Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative Book

This book is the Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead of 1980s and 1990s Washington D.C. It's a story of U.S. politics during the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations told from the view of a man who wrote influential Anita Hill takedowns and the article that launched Troopergate, in addition to a lot of other, similar material.

This man is David Brock, an adopted, gay U.C. Berkeley grad who admired RFK as a young adult but became turned off by what he perceived as censorial self-righteousness of liberal on-campus activists in college.

He moved to D.C. and joined the staff of the conservative The Washington Times after graduation, and then later joined The American Spectator, during which time, as he describes in this engaging, sobering, and clarifying memoir, he worked with a number of conservative lobbyists, lawyers, millionaires and billionaires, political operatives, politicians, and private investigators to publish apocryphal stories that would help get Clarence Thomas (the 5th vote in Bush v. Gore and Shelby County v. Holder) confirmed by a Democratic congress and harm Bill Clinton's presidential legacy and Hillary Clinton's political career and policy agenda. He had an insider's view of the Arkansas Project.

I started reading this book during perhaps the most heated moment of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when the Access Hollywood tape came out and Bill Clinton's sex scandals became relevant again. I finished it today. It seems even more important to bear witness in the shadow of an outcome so few of us expected. Many of the pro-Thomas, anti-Clinton individuals that Brock meets, works, and socializes with come across as extraordinarily craven, hypocritical, morally and ethically absent, downright looney (but also, in Brock's telling, pitiable).

I was a college classmate of Ken Starr's daughter and met him and stayed in his house when our a capella group toured the East Coast. They both seemed like decent people driven by a faith they believe in, and I wouldn't count him in the above group, although Brock's critiques of Starr's opportunistic embrace of prurience and willful mixing of politics and justice are fair.

Brock began to have second thoughts about his work and associations, as any sane person would.

On the strength of sales of his first book, The Real Anita Hill, Brock received a $1 million advance in 1995 from Simon & Schuster's Free Press to write a hit job on Hillary Clinton. He writes:
I attended only one short meeting with the publisher of Simon & Schuster, Jack Romanos, who asked me only one question before okaying the $1 million. Did I think Hillary Clinton was a lesbian? Romanos wanted to know.

...

By mid-1995, I had staffed up with a small brigade of researchers to get the job done. Washington and Arkansas were full of Hillary-haters, and by the time I was done, I felt as though I had talked to every one. I checked out every conceivable lead, and a lot of inconceivable ones, too. I spent days on the phone with Republican investigators on the Hill, everyone from the Barbarellas to Bossie, who gave me everything in their quiver. ... I dined at a fancy Italian restaurant with Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who was heading up the Whitewater inquiry, but he was looking for information from me.

...

After almost two years of research and writing, retracing every step of Hillary's life, doing more than one hundred interviews, and collecting virtually every piece of paper that had Hillary's name on it going back twenty years, I had something balanced to say about Hillary. Neither saintly nor evil, Hillary was a rare combination of passionate idealist and gutsy streetfighter. I was able to put myself in my subject's shoes, to judge her by the standards of the real world, not impossible ideals, to sympathize with the trials and tribulations she faced, and even to see a kind of beauty as a good soul tried to assert itself in difficult choices.
The resulting book, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, was, to Brock's benefactors and clique, a betrayal.

Booted out of a movement he had come to despise, Brock rebuilt his personal and professional life from scratch, wrote a private letter of apology to Anita Hill, and a public one to Bill Clinton. He slowly gained the trust of real journalists, Clinton loyalists, and then the Clintons themselves. He switched sides and worked for Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign and headed three pro-Hillary organizations, including Priorities USA, in 2016.

But this book was published in 2002, before any of the remarkable events of the past eight years. Here is what Brock writes about the relationship between the kind of politics he practiced in the 1980s and 1990s and voting:
Since coming to Washington in 1986, in the next dozen years that I worked so zealously as a movement conservative, I never once took the time to vote. ... I didn't vote because the act of voting, the truest and purest expression of one's political values as a citizen, would have forced me to confront the political lie that I was living.
After reading this book, which I recommend, one takeaway is clear. It is an argument that Brock makes explicitly as well, in some cases based on visceral, first-hand information of individuals like Laura Ingraham. Hillary Clinton is not, as many of her detractors and disappointed supporters argue, charismaless. She has a rare anti-charisma, in that self-doubting individuals who come into contact with her project onto her things they hate about themselves. She connects with voters, but too often, tragically, she connects with their darkest fears and insecurities instead of their hopes and dignity. They see their imperfections in her, they hate her for it, and past the point of reason in the case of 6.7 million voters and counting.

Glenn Greenwald, Susan Sarandon, and others on the pacifist left see in Hillary Clinton their own compromised relationship with American military power. They vote and protest against Middle East intervention, but then live and live well under the protection of drone strikes and mass surveillance. They hate themselves for it, and Iraq War-voting, Libya intervention-supporting Hillary makes for a ripe home for that hate.

In some hacked emails, Colin Powell accused Hillary Clinton of "hubris" and being "greedy." Powell's work on behalf of the Iraq War is the very definition of hubris. The New York Times never uses the word greed in this 2001 article:
Powell's Wealth Now Over $28 Million

Since his retirement from the military seven years ago, Gen. Colin L. Powell has become wealthy through high-priced speaking engagements, amassing an investment portfolio in excess of $28.2 million, according to his financial disclosure statement.

General Powell, who began Senate hearings today as President-elect George W. Bush's choice for secretary of state, earned $6.7 million in speaking fees last year in 109 appearances around the country, the records show.

In most cases, he charged $59,500 for his remarks to such diverse groups as Gallup, the polling organization; Petsmart, the pet supply company; Lucent Technologies; and Middlesex Community College. For a speech at Credit Suisse Financial Services, he received his highest fee for a single appearance: $127,500 on May 5.

...

General Powell said he would also resign from positions he holds outside of government. He left his membership on the corporate board of America Online last week. The disclosure records show that he will be able to take advantage of stock options from that company, which, if exercised today, would be worth $8.27 million.
Blinded by the Right and perhaps a great darkness in ourselves, Hillary became America's bête noire, and now we will soon have a leader whom zero of our living presidents voted for. Whatever the future holds, a lesson and next step might lie in the place where Brock's story turned years ago:
In finding Hillary Clinton's humanity, I was beginning to find my own.