Even after a month, Democrats still moan, bitch and whine about the outright humiliation they suffered at the polls during the midterm election.

It’s everybody else’s fault, they say, and to keep from blaming the real culprit – themselves – they now have resurrected an old fantasy: the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (otherwise known as the VRWC).

Al Gore says The Washington Times and Rush Limbaugh conspire to hurt Democrats. Tom Daschle blames a broader media base, which he claims is controlled by a right-win bias.

We’re heard this before. Hillary Clinton claimed her husband couldn’t possible be getting the lollipop treatment on the First Member by intern Monica Lewinsky. Nah, the whole thing was engineered by the VRWC. When it turned out to be true that Monica found Billy finger-licking good, Hillary didn’t admit she was wrong. She just stopped talking about it.

That’s the beauty of conspiracy theories. They serve your purpose when needed for spin, then can be discarded or forgotten when truth sinks the theory.

But Gore, Daschle and the other “it ain’t my fault” Democrats ran out of others to blame, so they had to resurrect the VRWC as the cause of all their woes. Never mind that any theory that media in this country could ever be controlled by a conservative agenda is about as plausible as Brittney Spears’ virginity. They need a scapegoat, damnit, and it sure as hell ain’t gonna be them.

The VRWC’s roots can be traced back to the Arkansas Project, a research program started by conservative publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, who wanted to sink Clinton’s proposed socialized health care program.

Such projects exists on both sides of the political fence. Scaif wanted to get Clinton. A group of liberals funded by Stewart Mott tried to do the same thing to George W. Bush, launching a rumor and fear program over Dubya’s alleged use of cocaine. Mott’s people spent millions combing through public records, interviewing just about anyone who ever came into contact with Bush and came up with nada. They enlisted help from some of the best investigative reporters in the nation and couldn’t find a thing to support the claim that young Bush had a problem with nose candy.

At least Scaife had a subject with real skeletons in the closet. Clinton is slated to be the most scandal-scarred president in modern history. Dalliances with women, sexual assaults, misuse of public funds, abuse of power – all this and more could and was documented as part of the Clinton legacy. He lost his law license for lying under oath and the respect of the American people for his constant abuses of public trust. His ability to escape more serious punishment came more from Republican incompetence than any innocence on his part.

So we didn’t need a VRWC to expose Clinton for what he was – a tail-chasing, lying, misogynist bastard. His inability to keep it in his pants put his administration into an immoral abyss, not Scaife’s money or any organized conspiracy.

And no VRWC sank Dems on election day last month. It was, instead, their own inability to understand the issues that drove American opinion, a stupid strategy of challenging a popular Republican president when we are at war with terror and a complete failure to motivate the voters who comprise the base of their party.

But a primary rule of politics is “never admit you’re wrong, even when you are.” Hence renewal of the VWRC.

Sorry guys, there ain’t no Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, no more than any real Vast Left Wing Conspiracy as often claimed by the paranoids on the other side of the fence.

Does this mean conspiracies don’t exist?

Not at all.

Something is out there.

I know.

I’m a charter member of the VBWC – otherwise known as the Vast Buffalo Wing Conspiracy.

Contrary to popular rumor, the VBWC did not start at the Anchor bar in Buffalo, New York (although buffalo wings did get their start there).

No, a group of us started the VBWC at Hooters in Fairfax, Virginia, in 1992. We started gathering there for three reasons:

1. The wings, of course.

2. The waitresses, of course.

3. And to ponder the question always asked at Hooters: “Do you think those are real?”

Opinion

For Dems, it's the wail of the lonesome whine

By MARTIN SCHRAM

Dec 4, 2002, 06:27

We all know how the London Bridge wound up as an Arizona tourist lure. But who moved the Wailing Wall into Washington's Democratic cloakrooms? Al Gore and Tom Daschle, the Democrats' most visible leaders, chose to follow their party's flaming Election Day defeat by wailing that their problem is the messengers in the media. Well, not all the messengers, just the right-wing ones.

What they both need is counseling - from Bill McInturff, one of Washington's savviest strategists. Unfortunately for them, McInturff is one pollster who's not about to help them, since his candidate client list is predominantly winners and unanimously Republican. But as we'll see, McInturff knows the needs of his Democratic opposition. Which seems to distinguish him from Messrs. Gore and Daschle.

"Fox News network, The Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh - there's a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultraconservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media," Gore, the Democrats' last standard-bearer, recently told an interviewer.

And Senate Democratic Leader Daschle lamented Democrats' inability to push their message through the fire and brimstone of the likes of Rush Limbaugh: "You know, we see it in foreign countries and we think, 'Well, my God, how can this religious fundamentalism become so violent?' Well, it's that same shrill rhetoric, it's that same shrill power that motivates. ... And that's happening in this country."

Some things improve with age, but Al Gore's vintage whine is not one of them. Neither is Tom Daschle's freshly-pressed gripe. They are, of course, right about the right: Contemporary conservative talk radio and TV has retired the cup for indoor shrillness. (Then again, conservative politicians chafed for decades about the fact that the reporters who cover them are more liberal than they are. Also, for a half century, political satire has been the purview of the show biz left.) But vehement opposition on the right is not new and not the Democrats' real problem. Far rightists were at their shrill peak when they blasted away at Bill Clinton (Gennifer, Paula, Whitewater, Troopergate) the moment he started running for president. Clinton won. Twice. Because he had a message, and ultimately a record; and voters found both appealing.

Gore couldn't win when he had peace and prosperity as his issues. Daschle couldn't lead his party to victory when the opposition had neither peace nor prosperity. The reason the Democrats couldn't win in 2000 and 2002 is that the voters had no idea what ideas Democrats stood for - and Democratic candidates didn't seem to know either.

Quick Quiz: What was the Democrats' big bold solution for health care? Prescription drugs? Social Security? Homeland security? Answer: There is no answer. You got the impression in campaign 2002 that the Democrats seemed to stand firmly for just one thing - winning by saying and doing whatever their pollsters told them to say and do.

Did I say pollsters? That brings us back to Bill McInturff, who has been successful by being basic. "Candidates don't get to pick which issues they will talk about," he says. "Voters pick the issues. Republicans learned the hard way, years ago, that when you don't talk about the issues voters want discussed, you'll lose. That was a lesson from my bad old days - in 1982. Republican candidates who talked about the so-called Democratic issues of unemployment and Social Security won. Candidates I had who said, 'These are Democratic issues so I won't talk about them' lost."

Bill Clinton won by co-opting traditional Republican issues; Republicans won in 2002 by addressing so-called Democratic issues they once eschewed. (Attention candidates: Don't talk when you are eschewing.) Actually, Daschle had one narrow window of opportunity to lead his party to victory: In 2001, after Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont, dropped his Republican allegiance and gave Democrats unprecedented mid-term control of the Senate, the nation looked to Senate Democrats in the same way the nation looks to a new president on Inauguration Day: We're watching; where will you lead us? But the Democrats, as though leaderless and visionless, gave the nation only micro-think. Example: In the middle of a war on terrorism, Democrats treated a Homeland Security bill like a wonky inside-the-Beltway crisis about labor unions. Say what?

Republican McInturff says that, because one of four voters is over 65, the Bush White House, a Karl Rove production, will plunge into the so-called Democratic issues. Bush & Company will launch a campaign of positive solutions for Social Security, health care, prescription drugs - the problems ordinary people care about most. That means Democrats may lose their best issues of 2004.

"You ain't seen nothin' yet," says McInturff.

Al Gore and Tom Daschle, call your offices.

(Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service.)

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