From: Bert Smith <bowler@mit.edu>
Subject: Re: Comrade Clinton
X-Xxdate: Tue, 6 Oct 92 20:02:34 GMT
Organization: Volunteer Clinton/Gore Email Team
X-Useragent: Nuntius v1.1.1d12
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 18:59:53 GMT

I think that the Bush/Quayle current mudslinging in regards to Bill
Clinton's trip to Moscow is reprehensible.  This is a total non-issue.  I
am really ashamed that any mass media gives any weight to these charges
by reporting them.  We should stick to the real issues.

The people that were at Oxford with Bill Clinton think that the chrages
are ridiculous.  I have included an article from today's Boston Globe
detailing the situation.  It is not just the supporters of Bill Clinton
who find the charges to be without any merit.  

Read this article, and note especially the second half.  Use the quotes
to refute Dornan et al.  They are desperate, let's keep the emphasis on
things that matter.

-bert

-------included article-------

By John Aloysius Farrell
GLOBE STAFF  10/6/92

     WASHINGTON - President Bush's reelection campaign is escalating its
"Red Willie" tactics, painting Bill Clinton as a Communist dupe who
conducted anti-American activities during  the Vietnam era.

     For the first time yesterday, top campaign officials openly attacked
Clinton on the issue.

     In a late afternoon "attack fax," Deputy Campaign Manager Mary
Matalin put her name to the unsubstantiated innuendo that Clinton engaged
in anti-American activities during the Vietnam war.  She said he may even
have been recruited as an "agent of influence" for the USSR when he
traveled to Moscow while studying as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford in 1969.

     The suggestion that Clinton was a Communist agent, a tactic known
informally at the president's campaign headquarters as the "Red Willie"
gambit, is based on Clinton's vacation trip to the Soviet Union and his
participation in a nonviolent branch of the antiwar movement.

     "Once again the wheel turns, and this time it lands in Moscow," said
Matalin, quoting freely from an account in the Washington Times, a
newspaper published by Sun Myung Moon, and citing its suggestion that
Clinton was a prime candidate for Soviet recruitment as "an agent of
influence."

     "What Bush is saying is pathetic and stupid, but also ugly," said
Michael Mandelbaum, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a Clinton
adviser.  "This is the Jim Baker version of Pat Buchanan's tactics:
trying to paint an opponent as anti-American, foreign, not like us," he
said.

     The Clinton campaign ridiculed the allegations.  Several of the
democrat's colleagues at Oxford, including one of Clinton's most bitter
enemies, disputed the notion that the Democratic candidate was an
anti-American radical.

     "Basically this is another indication of how desperate the
Republicans are at the thought of being thrown out of power," said a
Clinton spokeswoman, Max Parker.  "They are distorting the facts.  Moscow
was just one of many places Gov. Clinton visited as a tourist on a
vacation he took during winter break in 1969."

     Clinton aide Betsey Wright called the charge "vile."

     Republican Cliff Jackson, an Oxford classmate who has fueled some of
the harshest GOP attacks on Clinton's draft record, said in an interview
that Clinton "was not a radical."  He was looked down upon by more
fervent protesters who scorned Clinton's commitment to working within the
system.  Jackson said.

     "A number of us went down and walked around Piccadilly Square and
protested the war," said Harvard's Robert Reich, another Oxford classmate
of Clinton who now serves as an economic adviser.  "Rhodes Scholars
received a stipend to travel; we all set out at the end of the term, and
everyone went to the Soviet Union, at least once.  It was a time for
young men to see the world."

     "This is real fantasy.  It's difficult to find a crew more rooted in
the American establishment than Rhodes Scholars," Boston businessman John
Isaacson, another Oxford classmate of Clinton, said with a laugh.  "Most
of us bastards are probably Republican.  This is not a revolutionary. 
Cripes, not even close.

     "A lot of Rhodes people were interested in a career in public life
and wanted to see firsthand the Evil Empire.  A lot of people went.  We
had a vivid understanding of what the gulag was.  Nobody had any romantic
notions."

     Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Richard Stearns, a classmate who
joined Clinton in protesting the war, said the GOP charge was absurd. 
"They never complained about me," he said.  "And I spent nine years
working for the Reagan-Bush Justice Department."
Newsgroups: alt.politics.bush,talk.politics.misc