Smith ignores ideology, takes issue with both right and left

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 23, 1998 | by Stephen Goode

Left or, right, Washington has but a very few observers of the caliber honesty and overall orneriness at the right times and places than Sam Smith, longtime editor of the Progressive Review,a newsletter whose motto is "Washington's most unofficial source." A Green and a third-party type (he was cofounder in 1970 of the DC Statehood Party), Smith doesn't easily suffer foolishness, whatever its political stripe. He's author o the 1994 Shadows of Hope, one of the first books to spell out Bill Clinton's mendaciousness and shortcomings in illuminating detail.

Not one to mince words, in a recent issue of his newsletter Smith calls the Clinton administration "the most destructive presidency of modern times " and suggests that "the worst Clinton scandal may be yet to come." It's an opinion that has not been well-received by Smith's friends on the left.

Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual is this gadfly's most recent book. It carries the subtitle, How to Rebuild Our Country so the Politics Aren't Broken and Politicians Aren't Fixed. Asked to name current politicians he admires, Smith cites John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, and Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick J. Leahy. Why these men? "I come from the old-style politics in which trust is really an important factor" Smith tells Insight. "I think these are men who can be trusted."

Insight: Your politics aren't that easily defined. You've had a lot of critical things to say about both the right and the left.

Sam Smith: What I miss in conservatism is a real, visceral passion for the injustices of the world. What I miss in liberalism I guess would be a commonsensical approach to dealing with our problems.

But I probably hate boredom more than anything so, all ideology aside, I do have a certain respect for people who are raising some hell, even if I don't agree with them.

Saying this will probably be held against me, but I watch Larry Klayman, the Judicial Watch guy [see "Larry Klayman Followed Money Trail to the White House," Feb. 17, 1997]. 1 see in him an old antifreeway fighter of the sixties. It's the same thing. It's not the same ideology, but it's the same spirit.

That's where I started. My wife, Kathy, always tells this story about me. She came from Wisconsin where everything was nice and orderly. We weren't married more than a month or so when I took her to an antifreeway meeting, and she could not believe that these 15 or 20 people in this room thought they were going to stop a freeway.

But the thing is, we did, and you see, after that experience my life has been downhill ever since.

Insight: You've been an outspoken critic of President Clinton. What's your thinking on the man?

SS: The postmodernist world has been described as a place where everything that was once real is turned into an image of itself, and what I think is that Clinton became truly our first president who was an image of himself. The degree of manipulation of symbolism [in this administration] is so extraordinary.

Now I'm enough of an optimist to believe that after we've gone through one or two or three of these types, we'll get tired of them and we're going to want a different kind. We're going to want a little reality.

I think this is why people are having so much trouble with the whole Monica Lewinsky business, because it's really their first introduction to the downside of Clinton in depth.

My sense in talking to people is that they have lost a feeling of their own right to make choices and judge things and say something is wrong. This is part of what happens in a propaganda age when we're so constantly manipulated that we lose our capacity to think for ourselves.

I have my own theory about what's happened, and it is that we've all been victimized by the Washington legal definition of how we should make up our minds about things so that we are told, for example, that there must be a smoking gun and we need this rule of evidence and that rule of evidence, so people forget they have the right to think for themselves and make a judgment about whether they want this guy as president.

Insight: Is the welfare state a moribund idea?

SS: The whole notion that the social welfare state is intrinsically evil, I think, has a lot to do with the fact that such a huge percentage of our population came of age in the most decadent period of liberalism, so that they have no direct understanding of what the positive effects of these programs are.

It was not until 1929 that New York passed a law which said you had to have a toilet for every apartment, and that's the part of the welfare state people forget about. There's a solid reason for the welfare state: You really didn't want dead horses lying in the street!

But I always say that the last thing I want to do is get into a political battle about extending a program that isn't working. I've always argued whole affirmative-action thing would have been quite different if we included ZIP codes with race and gender. If we had introduced class, in other words, [affirmative action would be easier to stomach] because Americans feel quite differently about helping people because of their economic disadvantage.