Had the liberal press (Make no mistake, it IS liberal!) done its' investigative homework back in 1992 the country might have been spared the foibles and scandals of the Clinton administration.
While he was no doubt innocent of some of things he was accused of, Clinton's character was tainted by the political background that he came from. Namely, the good-old-boy system of Arkansas politics. The Democratic Party has controlled the General Assembly of Arkansas without interruption since the end of Reconstruction. One hundred twenty-eight years of one party rule is not a good thing. For the first ninety years of that period they maintained control through the use of Jim Crow. For the last 35, they've maintained control by presenting themselves as the friends of the poor, the neglected, and the comman man.
After 128 years of such enlightened leadership Arkansas still ranks near the bottom of the 50 states in almost every category that matters.
You don't maintain such control by accident. Arkansas' political history is replete with instances of election officials tampering with ballots, back-stabbing, and abuse of power to cover up scandals. No Democratic leader would allow one of his own to be dragged through the mud of scandal if he could help it. (He may be the scum of the earth, but he's OUR scum!) Clinton was deeply mired in this good-old-boy system.
In 1990, in his last election campaign for Governor before the start of his first presidential campaign, Clinton found himself losing ground in the polls to his Republican challenger. Sheffield Nelson was a former Democrat who Clinton had once appointed to head a regulatory commission. The gas company that it regulated later closed its offices in Little Rock and relocated to Texas. Business and political leaders demanded an investigation to determine if Nelson had encouraged the company to move its offices in return for unnamed favors. This happened in 1986 I believe, although I don't remember for certain. A subsequent investigation by the State Government cleared Nelson of any wrong-doing. Case closed.
Or it should have been. As I said, in 1990 Clinton was losing ground in the polls to Nelson, who stood a good chance of unseating him in the election in November. Two weeks before election day, Clinton had some of his "boys" in the attorney general's office reopen the investigation of Nelson. This was done to the accompaniment of splashy television and newspaper coverage.
A former editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper, John Robert Starr, who up until that time had been a Clinton supporter, asked him in a telephone conversation if he understood the meaning of the phrase "abuse of power." According to Starr, Clinton just laughed.
From that point on, Starr no longer counted himself as a Clinton supporter.
I'll not mention his sexual scandals, because that ground has been gone over so many times that the grass has been beaten flat. But suffice it to say that the Monica Lewinsky scandal caught no one in Arkansas by surprise.
Regards, Shuckins
