Oklahoma City and Political Parties

Twenty-five years ago today, domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168  and wounding more than 600 in the worst U.S. terror attack before 9/11.

In class, we briefly touched upon the implications for party politics.

A decade ago, Peter Keating wrote about Bill Clinton's response:

Oklahoma City that first allowed him to step forward as a national leader. As speechwriter Michael Waldman [parent of a CMC alum] wrote in his book POTUS Speaks: “It was the nation’s first exposure to Clinton as mourner in chief … In fact, it was the first time Clinton had been a reassuring figure rather than an unsettling one.”

Even more than that, Oklahoma City created a huge political opportunity, which Clinton quickly seized. On April 27, a little more than a week after the bombing, Dick Morris, then a little-known but influential Clinton adviser, presented the President a fantastically naked political memo that, as you can find in his book Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All Odds, said: “Permanent possible gain: sets up Extremist Issue vs. Republicans.” Morris suggested using “extremism as issue against Republicans,” not by “direct accusations,” but via a “ricochet theory.”

 Clinton should “stimulate national concern over extremism and terror,” Morris wrote, and then “implement intrusive policy against extremist groups.” Morris predicted that radical right-wingers would write their local Republican congressmen, and that in turn “this will provoke criticism by right-wing Republicans which will link right-wing of the party to extremist groups.”

“Net effect,” Morris concluded: “Self-inflicted linkage between party and extremists.”

The Clinton Justice Department didn’t go as far as Morris wanted, but it didn’t matter. Republican members of Congress soon made fools of themselves defending militias. And Clinton found his voice. At a Michigan State commencement address shortly afterward, he told graduates, “There is nothing patriotic about hating your country, or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government.”

In his memoirs, Clinton didn’t mention the Morris memo, but wrote: “The haters and extremists didn’t go away, but they were on the defensive, and, for the rest of my term, would never quite regain the position they had enjoyed after Timothy McVeigh took the demonization of government beyond the limits of humanity.” Indeed, Oklahoma City gave Clinton the chance to pull his presidency together by advancing a positive agenda of triangulated social issues. And that strategy reached full flower in his 1996 State of the Union speech, where Clinton introduced a man named Richard Dean, a Vietnam vet who had worked in the Oklahoma City Federal Building and who re-entered the building four times to rescue people after it blew up. As everyone, including Republicans, stood to applaud, Clinton went on:

But Richard Dean’s story doesn’t end there. This last November, he was forced out of his office when the government shut down. And the second time the government shut down, he continued helping Social Security recipients, but he was working without pay … I challenge all of you in this chamber: Never, ever shut the federal government down again.

That’s how much Clinton got it: He explicitly linked the terror of Oklahoma City to the federal shutdown, and both to the Republican Congress. After that, Clinton barely needed to look over his shoulder to get reelected.

For your last paper, you might compare and contrast the militia groups of 1995 with today's corionavirus activists.   Might it be that politicians who side with the activists are setting themselves up for backlash in case the protests have bad consequences?