HILLARY Rodham Clinton, even if her approval rating is now the lowest ever recorded for a president’s wife. The First Lady does have her defenders, and two years ago, a number of them got together and formed an organization called the Back to Business Committee. To hear chairman Lynn Cutler tell it, Back to Business is a grassroots operation, the result of a spontaneous outpouring of support for Hillary from women all over the country who are incensed by her treatment at the hands of Republican inquisitors. Cutler has spent much of the last two years hopping from talk show to newspaper interview in defense of Hillary Clinton, doing her best to explain away the details of the Whitewater and travel offce scandals, while at the same time denouncing the current Senate investigation as a right-wing witch hunt. FED UP HILLARY PALS FIGHT BACK — it makes a good headline. Only it’s not quite accurate.
For one thing, the Back to Business Committee doesn’t actually exist, at least not in the strict physical sense. “Like, we don’t have an actual Back to Business offce,” is how Stacy Beck, whose name is listed on the group’s press releases, describes the situation. Instead, the for-profit “committee,” which has no dues-paying members, is located in the starkly modern offices of the Kamber Group, a liberal public relations firm in downtown Washington headed by a former organized-laborofficial named Victor Kamber.
Indeed, determining where the Kamber Group ends and the Back to Business Committee begins is no simple task. The committee’s chairman and only apparent corporate offxcer, Lynn Cutler, is also vice president and a long- time employee of the group. (Cutler claims the committee has other chartered officers, but can’t remember their names.) The Kamber Group, one of the biggest firms of its kind in the city, handles nearly all of the committee’s operations, which makes Lynn Cutler, as an executive of both organizations, her own client. Asked to explain the confusing arrangement, Stacy Beck pleads confusion: “You’re getting into technicalities that are a little too complicated for me.”
The group’s literature does its best to set matters straight. “Back to Business is an organization of Democrats,” it says, “with no official connection to either the Democratic Party or the Clinton Administration.” Maybe, but if the committee itself doesn’t have ties to the White House, the people who work for it do. The list of Kamber Group employees reads like a Democratic party alumni directory. Kamber executive Don Sweitzer, who has appeared on television several times in the past few weeks representing the committee was until recently the political director of another committee — the Democratic National Committee. Kamber’s director of media relations, Enid Doggett, worked on the 1992 Clinton campaign. Lynn Cutler herself worked for 12 years as vice chairman of the DNC. Neel Lattimore, Hillary Clinton’s spokesman and a man keenly interested in the work of the Back to Business Committee, spent three years as a Kamber employee.
Not to mention the Kamber Group itself, which has significant financial ties to the Democratic party. Cutler says that the firm landed a major contract with the DNC about six months ago — not long after the Back to Business Committee had begun to defend Mrs. Clinton in earnest.
The literature that the Karobet Group/Back to Business Committee puts out — in press releases and on its site on the Internet — can sound a little intemperate. Conservative philanthropist Richard Scaife, who has funded investigations into Whitewater and Vince Foster’s death, is described as a ” right-wing sugar daddy extraordinaire.” Bold headlines invite readers to learn about the “Scaife-Gingrich Connection” and Senator Alfonse “D’Amato’s Ties to the Mob.”
For Back to Business chairman Cutler, such bare-knuckle lobbying comes naturally. The 57-year-old Cutler has been playing flack to embattled Democratic leaders since before many current White House staffers were out of high school. As a DNC offcial in 1987, Cutler defended California controller Gray Davis (now the state’s lieutenant governor), who had been accused of using state phones to make long-distance fund-raising pitches, including several to the Karobet Group. Davis’s staff, Cutler bravely insisted at the time, “could have been returning a call.” Two years later, in 1989, Cutler came to the aid of Rep. Barney Frank (brother of former Back to Business chairman Ann Lewis) when the congressman was found to have a male prostitution business operating out of his Washington townhouse. “The service Barney Frank has provided to this country cannot be overshadowed by this one incident,” Cutler told the press. “I wouldn’t call it a transgression.”
Such dogged loyalty to the party has brought Cutler a long way since 1981, when she was a county commissioner in Waterloo, Iowa. After losing two campaigns for Congress, she relocated to Washington and spent much of the 1980s helping to run the DNC.
Like the designated brawler on a losing hockey team, Cutler often makes up in aggression what she lacks in substance. One of her favorite ideological hip checks is throwing charges of bigotry at her political enemies. In 1994, she wrote the now-infamous fund-raising letter for Dianne Feinstein, in which she implied that Feinstein’s opponent in the California Senate race, Michael Huffington, was an anti-Semite. Huffington, she wrote, “represents everything that is antithetical to us as women and as Jews.” Her evidence? As Cutler later explained to the Washington Post, “He’s for school prayer. And he’s not in favor of a woman’s right to choose abortion.”
Needless to say, it has been a tougher assignment to cast the Protestant Hillary Clinton as a victim of anti-Jewishprejudice. But Cutler is not easily stymied. The latest attacks on the First Lady by “Al D’Amato et al.,” she declares, are nothing less than a “pogrom.” When she isn’t crying bigotry, Cutler likes to trot out what might be called the “America can’t take a strong woman” thesis. “This is so typical,” Cutler remarked to old friend and IVashington Post columnist Judy Mann (who has promoted Cutler in no fewer than 14 separate columns for the newspaper). “Strong woman stands up, speaks out, moves forward, barn. This is not just Hillary under attack here. It’s everybody.”
The Kamber Group may have been the natural choice for the job of defending Hillary Clinton. Like Lynn Cutler, the firm’s head, Victor Kamber, has a history of coming to the aid of Democrats in trouble. It was Kamber, after all, who in 1980 directed the Citizens Committee for Frank Thompson’s Defense, a group dedicated to helping the New Jersey congressman beat charges that he took bribes in the Abscam sting. Unfortunately for Thompson, Kamber’s help didn’t do much good. The congressman was later convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.
by Tucker Carlson
