How I almost brought down the president...

For years David Brock was one of the rightwing journalists who hounded Bill Clinton with allegations of sexual impropriety, abuse of power, even drug-running. Then he changed sides. Here, for the first time, he reveals who was at the heart of the conspiracy to destroy the president

Tuesday March 12, 2002
The Guardian

The recent machinations of the American right - blaming Bill Clinton for the terrorist attack of September 11, comparing Senate majority leader Tom Daschle to Saddam Hussein, exploiting the war in Afghanistan for domestic political gain, trying to spin Enron as a scandal for the Democrats - are all examples of the kind of political tactics pioneered by the Republican right wing in the past decade. People want to say this is politics as usual, but it's really an outgrowth of a singular transformative event that began when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992. That was when the conservative movement turned American politics toxic, as its members plotted to disrupt and destroy the Clinton presidency.

From the moment he was elected, the right regarded Clinton as an illegitimate usurper and dedicated itself to preventing him from being president. As the leading scandal reporter for the rightwing monthly the American Spectator, I had a ringside seat to this unprecedented effort. My story - being published in book form this month in America as Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative - is the first insider's account of the well-organised and heavily financed anti-Clinton attack machine that ushered in a decade's worth of vicious culture-war politics. When Hillary Clinton referred to this political operation as a "vast rightwing conspiracy," she was widely ridiculed in the American press. But I can say with certainty that a conspiracy was, in fact, at work. I was in on it from the beginning. The only problem with Mrs Clinton's description was that the group was not terribly "vast". Nor was everyone who helped spread the tales of Clinton's alleged improprieties part of the conspiracy: some were simply running with what looked like a good story, others jumped on the bandwagon for their own political reasons.

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