I TOLD YOU SO

My gut told me that the Clinton pardons were more than a passing scandal. They obviously have legs. Check out Rick Berke’s astonishing on-the-record piece in today’s New York Times on the extent of the continuing criticism within the party and despondency that inevitably follows. Dozens of you emailed to tell me I was wrong at the time – that the press and the Dems would never, ever turn on Clinton. Sorry, you were wrong. But the best news of the piece is that the Dems also now realize publicly that Al Gore’s campaign was truly wretched. This, in fact, is good news for the Democrats. In order to recuperate, the Dems have to purge the party of Clinton’s personal ethics and Gore’s campaign policies. The selection of Terry McAuliffe is about the worst thing they could have possibly done, but there’s still time to regroup. Joe Lieberman is surely the key player here. He needs to recover his anti-Hollywood voice; and it would be particularly gratifying to hear him condemn the Rich pardon. Coming from a prominent Jew, it would certainly carry weight. He also needs to say publicly that, in retrospect, he was wrong to junk his former positions against racial preferences and experimenting with school vouchers under pressure from Gore and the Congressional Black Caucus. Hard for him to do, I know. But a true purge requires someone deeply implicated in the Gore debacle to say what needs to be said. I say this from England, watching a Tory party that never fully examined the reasons for its collapse in 1997 in the immediate aftermath and so took longer to recover than was necessary. The Dems are in nowhere near the parlous state of the Tories four years ago – but the lesson still holds.