Word: halperin
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Over the years, Halperin's liberal views have achieved their most ardent expression in defense policy, a piece of hallowed conservative turf. Yet he used his position as a director of the A.C.L.U. to espouse such profoundly nonliberal campaigns as defending the constitutional rights of Oliver North, Lyn Nofziger and the conservative student writers at the Dartmouth Review...
Despite such ideological balance, Halperin has suffered from a hit-and-run campaign by conservative ideologues, most notably Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan Pentagon official who has been firing off tirades at him since last June. From his berth at the right-wing Center for Security Policy, a private Washington research unit, Gaffney has sent streams of faxes showcasing a highly selective sampling of Halperin's writings to a list of 1,200 leading people in Washington...
Last week, after months of enforced silence (nominees are prohibited from defending themselves until their hearings), Halperin was finally allowed to respond. He introduced his family (including his grandson, who promptly fell asleep) and then declared, "Charges have been made about my beliefs and activities which are simply false. They are, in some cases, made up out of whole cloth; in others, they result from wrenching sentences out of context and building tales around them...
True or not, the tales have been effective. In the likely event that the committee will fail to vote before Congress recesses for the holidays, Clinton will be forced to decide whether to resubmit Halperin's name in January and risk yet another bruising battle. If previous White House behavior offers any guide, his nomination may be headed for the dustbin...
...Halperin is only the latest in a line of liberal Clinton nominees who have either been dumped outright or forced to sit on their hands while right-wing lawmakers fulminate and filibuster against their views. Roberta Achtenberg, Clinton's assistant secretary for fair housing, was kept from her job for months while North Carolina's Jesse Helms denounced her as a "showpiece of the homosexual movement." Meanwhile, Walter Dellinger, now an assistant Attorney General, was in limbo for six months because Helms and Lauch Faircloth, also of North Carolina, took offense at Dellinger's record of reasoned -- though pointedly liberal...