Gadfly contest: make your pick: irritating? Sometimes … but also absolutely necessary for maintaining the nation's ideological health. Insight presents 10 political protagonists we can't live without

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 10, 2002 | by Hans S. Nichols

Defining a Washington Gadfly is a bit like identifying pornography: You know it when you see it. Unlike the Ritz Barfly, the Washington Gadfly is not always well-dressed. They do, however, have elegantly tailored ideas, which they produce in every available forum with frequency, fervency and phantasmagoria.

Despite a pretension to seriousness, the gadfly is an affable creature, seen fluttering amiably about cable television or stalking the halls of Congress, often in the name of some lost cause or incipient crusade. A gadfly can be in the center of the storm one day and watching from the sidelines the next, but through it all he (or she) stays deeply (that's deeply) committed to the cause, whatever it may be. While the gadfly irritates, that is its job, and therefore it should be a protected species. To swat it fatally away would be a disservice to the country, because the gadfly is a needed pest: one which by sheer persistence can annoy the country onto the right track or set it aright by negative reaction.

The following list has been compiled with the help of INSIGHT online readers (www.insightmag.com) who made nominations to our first Essential Gadflies contest: "10 Gadflies Washington Could NOT Do Without."

Larry Klayman: This is one difficult man. He has, as critics often note, sued his own mother.

Though his political targets change with the times, his weapon is an old standby: the well-publicized lawsuit. Back when he was pestering the previous White House, the Washington Post described the Judicial Watch chairman as a "crusading conservative with a yen for hardball and a knack for peppering Clintonites with litigation."

While Klayman doesn't reject the conservative label, he is by no means a partisan (or loyal) Republican as Bush and Co. learned when this pesky litigator sued the administration to force the release of documents from the White House Energy Task Force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. "People in this town confuse conservatism with Republicanism, and they're not necessarily the same," he told INSIGHT this spring.

While his recent judicial antics haven't won him any new friends on the left, they have earned him a grudging respectability, giving hope to his expectation that Judicial Watch will become "the conservative, nonpartisan American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU]." Perhaps that explains why the ACLU reportedly is trying to hire retiring conservative Dick Armey of Texas, who is leaving his post as House majority leader.

"I have high regard for Larry," says Free Congress Foundation President Paul Weyrich, a fellow gadfly who remains closer to the Bush White House. "Much of what he does is brilliant. He goes after [President George W.] Bush and the Republicans when they are guilty of the same things on which Larry has fought and won cases against [Bill] Clinton and the Democrats."

Not that Klayman has gone soft on the Clintons. In mid-November, his client Gennifer Flowers won a landmark appeal to sue Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), ABC News This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos and the ever-present James Carville for defamation.

Carville, who missed the Essential Gadflies list this year by a whisker, is none too excited about the headache that calls itself Klayman. "It was a frivolous lawsuit when it was filed. It is and always shall be a frivolous lawsuit and a complete waste of everybody's time," he says. All of this, no doubt, is true--except for discovering the truth. But that may be Klayman's intention.

Charlie Peters: Here is one of the deans of Washington journalism, or at least of the left-leaning variety. As the editor of Washington Monthly, he has given many enterprising young writers their start. Today, his proteges are scattered all about town, with heavy representation at venues such as the New Republic and Slate. Most of them are quite happy to be making a living wage, as Peters famously underpays his green writers, believing that their penury will encourage them to freelance and thereby make a name for themselves and, perhaps, him.

His real legacy may not be his well-regarded magazine, but the legions of liberal journalists, loyal to their old boss and his politics, who have gone on to make trouble. As Jon Meacham, the current editor of Newsweek, wrote in Business Week, "Charles Peters has been ahead of his time on a lot of things, but especially with his insight that journalism should bring narrative storytelling to what works and does not work in government." As a self-described liberal, Peters has done much to move the national news coverage in this direction (see "Editor of the Washington Monthly Mentor to Reporters of AU Stripes," Feb. 2, 1998).

And he's convinced that journalists should not be embarrassed by the "liberal" tag. As Meacham wrote, "Everybody knows that many of the political tenets of neoliberalism are part of the American mainstream, but I believe Peters' quiet crusade to force reporters to think novelistically about seemingly unglamorous subjects is our best bet to get the media to do a better job of bringing the story of government alive to broad audiences." Despite being a curmudgeon, there's something likable about Peters' willingness to shout his partisanship amiably from any cooperating soapbox. When asked to grade President Bush, he told The Hill, "It's a close call between a C-minus and a D-plus. I go with the former because I do find myself liking the man."