Because it pays to know what the other side is thinking, one of my alter egos regularly drops Dick Morris' e-mail blasts in my Inbox. It's not nearly as bad as you would imagine. He is, after all, a pollster who on occasion offers some well-founded insight.
It's been entertaining, too, because his unbridled, visceral hatred of all things Clinton drives Dick seriously and embarrassingly off the reservation when the subject is Hillary Clinton. I mean the kind of stuff that would make even Karl Rove go "eeeeiiuw."
So with that frame of reference, Dick's column in today's New York Post was par for the course (I'd provide a link, but I don't want to give Rupert the hits). Having danced on Hillary's grave at some other time and place, he has tuned his attention now to Barack Obama.
And what was his casus belli?
The selection of Eric Holder as one of Obama's three-member vice-presidential selection team. Who?
Well, let Dick tell it:
As deputy attorney general, Holder was the key person who made the pardon of Marc Rich possible in the final hours of the Clinton presidency. Now, Obama will be stuck in the Marc Rich mess.
Really? And why was that so important?
If ever there was a person who did not deserve a presidential pardon, it's Marc Rich, the fugitive billionaire who renounced his US citizenship and moved to Switzerland to avoid prosecution for racketeering, wire fraud, 51 counts of tax fraud, evading $48 million in taxes, and engaging in illegal trades with Iran in violation of the US embargo following the 1979-80 hostage crisis.
OK, Rich's name rings a faint bell. But why was Eric Holder important to any of this? That gets a little harder to explain, but I'll try. Rich wanted a pardon, and according to Morris' account, an "adviser" to Rich sought someone who could get it for him after 17 years on the lam. This unnamed "adviser" spoke to Holder, who recommended Jack Quinn, former counsel to president Clinton.
A little well-timed lobbying, and the pardon was issued.
Congress spent an inordinate amount of time, well into 2002, examining the Clinton pardons, and true to the fashion of all the anti-Clinton attacks, announced there was nothing there. Clinton's rationale for the Rich pardon was that similar cases were handled in civil, not criminal, court. Prominent legal scholars have agreed, and some have opined that even a civil case could not be made against Rich. And in the you-can't-make-this-stuff-up department, from 1985 to 2000, Rich's lawyer was none other than I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
This is what has Dick Morris' hackles up. Says Dick:
It is one thing to reach back to Obama's pastor to raise doubts about his values. But it is quite another to scrutinize the record of his first appointee.
It couldn't be a bigger mistake.
There are four big problems with Dick's thesis that the nomination of Holder is a mistake:
First, no one knows who Mark Rich is. Let's be brutally honest. In the list of Bill's scandals, his name wouldn't even crack the top 10. Only some hardcore right-wingers, or DC insiders (or both) know the name Mark Rich, let alone make any connection to Obama.
Pardons made at the end of a president's term always contain some who deserved it and some who didn't. With the exception of Ford's pardon of Nixon, pardons are generally not something the media much notices, nor that the public remembers -- let alone tars another candidate with.
Second, the thread connecting Rich and his so-called criminality to Obama is awfully thin. Let me see if I can follow it: the third guy on Obama's VP search team recommended the guy who was the lawyer recommended by the adviser of some guy that was supposed to be a really bad white collar criminal that Bill Clinton pardoned 17 years after he fled the country in 1983. When Barack Obama was 22.
Trying to explain this kooky, insider-baseball, daisy chain to ordinary Post readers took Dick Morris 250 words, and it's still tough to figure out why it's a bad thing.
Compare and contrast to this example: It's pretty easy to explain to people that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove knew each other and likely conspired to out a spy as retribution for her husband's very public dissent over the war.
Third, Mark Rich was accused of white collar crimes. Republicans tend not to think that's such a bad thing, and really lack moral clarity on the subject. Their moral authority becomes even more muddled when the man's supposed crime was doing business in Iran when Halliburton, to this day, maintains a sizable office in Tehran. I can't say if it closed during the embargo or not, but perhaps a commenter who's researched it could fill us in.
Suffice to say, I don't see McCain or his surrogates bringing any of this up. I'm pretty sure this is the first and last we hear of it.
But the fourth problem may be the juiciest, even if it requires indulging in a little speculation. Here's Morris' exact quote on the link between Eric Holder, Jack Quinn and Mark Rich:
It was Holder who had originally recommended Quinn to one of Rich's advisers, although he claims that he did not know the identity of the client.
Note that Holder claims he never knew the name of the client, yet in the same sentence, Morris says the go-between was an "adviser" to Mark Rich.
Whose name we never learn.
What are the odds that this "adviser" is Scooter Libby? Even better, what are the odds it's Dick Morris?