The Politics of Personal Destruction

Like Starr, she has been characterized as a ruthlessly partisan Republican who has unjustifiably and unlawfully seized control of the American political system when she really ought to have recused herself in the first place. Chris Lehane of the Gore campaign said she was “in the finest tradition of a Soviet commissar” — a line of attack familiar from impeachment days. Clinton backer Gene Lyons once described Starr’s staff as “junior varsity commissars.”

Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News said that Harris “is trying to steal the election for George W. Bush . . . this is a mugging.” This argument is a near-echo of the case made against Kenneth Starr that he was trying to undo the will of the American people as expressed in the 1996 election. Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe referred to Harris’s “astonishing abuse of authority” — again echoing the anti-Starr talking points of 1998, according to which the independent counsel was abusing his powers by poking into matters that would not have triggered legal action in other cases.

And like Starr, who Democrats insisted should recuse himself from the Clinton case because he had represented a tobacco company, Harris has been called on to recuse herself because of her participation in the Bush campaign — which has been deemed prima facie evidence of a lack of integrity. Nelson even compared her unfavorably with Jeb Bush: “The Florida governor and George W.’s younger brother had sense enough to recuse himself from any role in the disputed Florida vote because of the obvious conflict of interest. Harris has just as much conflict . . . ”

Harris has “as much conflict” as the candidate’s own brother?

But it was not enough to smear her in Starr-like ways. No, the Gore partisans have also made implicit comparisons between Harris and the person whose reputation suffered the most during the Lewinsky scandal — Linda Tripp. Like Tripp, Harris has been characterized as an ugly witch with runaway personal ambitions — and as a criminal to boot.

Both Paul Begala on NBC and Margery Eagan in the Boston Herald likened Harris to the Disney villainess who wants to kill Dalmatians to make them into fur coats. Begala said she looked “like Cruella De Vil coming to steal the puppies.” Eagan not only used the Cruella De Vil analogy, but also said Harris was reminiscent of cross-dressing freaks like “Dr. Richard Sharpe, the transvestite and alleged wife killer. Or Marilyn Manson. . . . Or Leona Helmsley on Halloween.”

And like Leona Helmsley, Gore partisans say, she’s a felon. The Jesse Jackson of the American legal system, Alan Dershowitz, got himself on a plane down to Florida last week in time to tell CNN’s Wolf Blitzer: “She’s corrupt. She’s the woman who has had all kinds of problems. She’s had to pay back $ 20,000 of laundered money. She’s had all kind of corruption allegations about expenditures of money. She’s a crook. She’s a crook and an operative of the Bush campaign.”

An embarrassed Blitzer interjected: “I just want to point out some of the things you were saying were allegations, not necessarily proven facts involving the secretary of state of Florida.”

To which Dershowitz replied: “Some of them were proven.”

Even that slimy formulation is a lie. The matter to which Dershowitz referred was an illegal campaign-finance scheme hatched by a Florida insurance company, which gave $ 400,000 to 96 different local candidates in 1994. Harris’s campaign for the state legislature received $ 20,600, the largest single amount, and her campaign manager was described as an “unindicted co-conspirator.” But there is no evidence that Harris herself had any knowledge of the scheme, and neither she nor any of the other 95 candidates who received the contributions was indicted or even criticized by the prosecutors.

For this non-offense, she was slandered as a money launderer by Alan Dershowitz, whom it would be almost impossible to slander.

The most serious charge against Harris, and one that actually dealt with her professional conduct, was that her behavior last week was “arbitrary and capricious,” in the words of Gore campaign adviser Warren Christopher. As a matter of hard fact, it was anything but. What Harris did was hew closely to Florida election law as it was written. The deadline she enforced for reporting results was written into the law, and there were no guidelines for ignoring it. In addition, the statute governing manual recounts seems to have been drafted to suggest they take place only when some calamity befalls the voting machines or the computer software used in some counties to count votes.

It would have been perfectly fair to argue that Harris was being hair-splittingly legalistic in both the imposition of the deadline and the guidance she gave to the canvassing commissions in Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach counties about whether they should proceed with manual recounts. But under no definition of either term was she “arbitrary” or “capricious.”

But then, the purpose of the campaign to defame Katherine Harris had nothing to do with truth or fairness. It was a way of rallying the Gore troops by giving them a focal point for their runaway emotions — a manufactured bad guy like Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell’s 1984, whose image appears on television screens every day for two minutes to allow the shackled folk of Oceania to vent their misplaced rage.

It was also a bald-faced effort to intimidate Harris into reversing course, with the all-but-spoken threat that she would become a dehumanized, depersonalized force of evil instead of a local official in Florida who looked to the letter of the law for guidance at a time when we needed the law the most.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.