Old News from New Hampshire

By Ken Silverstein

The story I wrote last week suggesting that wildly wealthy Congressman Jeb Bradley put his stock holdings into a blind trust generated a flurry of news stories and “set off a spark in this fall's New Hampshire House race,” according to an account in the Boston Globe. Bradley attacked me in a press release, and now the New Hampshire Union Leader, one of the most conservative papers in the country, has attacked me as well.

In an unsigned editorial, the newspaper described me as a “left-wing journalist” who was conspiring with kindred mischief-makers to portray poor rich Jeb Bradley “as a radical right-winger intent on raping the environment to line his own pockets.” Readers of the story, said the editorial, should have been “immediately tipped off to its flimsiness by its first sentence, which identifies Bradley as a conservative . . . Bradley is neither a conservative nor a pawn of Big Oil nor a venal stockholder who votes against the public's interests to line his own pockets.”

Attacking its opponents as being left-wing is a long tradition at the Union Leader. For example, in the summer of 1964, the paper ran a series of editorials attacking civil rights activists who it accused of fomenting trouble in the South. These activists, said one editorial, could have better spent their time by “attempting to restrain Negro gangs in New York rather than by traveling hundreds of miles to agitate in Mississippi.”

The low point came in a June 14, 1964 when the newspaper attacked “Communists and allied agitators egging on the black gangs.” The editorial quoted a World War II vet at a local barber shop as saying, “You'd be surprised how many Japs could be controlled behind the barbed wire by just a couple of marines with Browning automatic rifles,” and who had proposed that “concentration camps” for blacks might be a good idea. In an unusual display of moderation, the Union Leader said that while it disliked “the idea of concentration camps in this country,” such a solution seemed preferable to “compelling white people to go around in armed bands” to protect themselves from marauding Negroes.

The Union Leader is no longer a John Birch Society-style insane asylum, but it remains staunchly conservative—especially its editorial page—and employs the same tactics as ever. I inquired at the Union Leader about the author of the editorial and was told it was the editorial page editor, Drew Cline. Given that Cline finds me guilty of displaying a political bias, he himself must be a paragon of impartiality.

Not exactly. In his spare time, Cline writes for the National Review and The American Spectator. He has been a past Journalism Fellow at the Maryland-based Phillips Foundation, whose goal is advancing “the cause of objective journalism.” Trustees at this public-spirited organization include Becky Norton Dunlop of The Heritage Foundation, columnist Robert Novak, and Alfred Regnery, publisher of The American Spectator.

Prior to that Cline was a reporter and director of publications for the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina. According to the News & Observer of Raleigh, the foundation was created by Art Pope, “the powerful patron of the political right in North Carolina” and a man whose family “has given so much money to the state Republican Party—at least $700,000 in recent years—that the party headquarters bears the family's name.” When he was appointed to his current position in 2001, Cline said, “The Union Leader is one of the handful of prominent conservative editorial voices in the country. I wouldn't fit in very well at the Boston Globe or the New York Times.” Politically, I think I really fit in here.” In other words, Cline is a right-wing activist with a very distinct agenda.

My own politics are generally on the left. To Cline, this is enough to discount everything I've written. But the issue isn't what I think; it's what I wrote. Cline is certainly entitled to his beliefs—and I commend him for at least acknowledging his political sympathies, unlike the vast majority of political writers, who pretend to be “objective”—but for the Union Leader to toss around accusations of bias is hypocritical to say the least.

And only someone with Cline's hard-right politics could state that Bradley is not a “conservative.” While Bradley's not at the far right fringe of the G.O.P. (which I never suggested), he gets a 61 composite conservative rating from the National Journal , higher than any other member of New Hampshire's all-Republican congressional delegation, and just five points less than that noted liberal, Katherine Harris of Florida.

When he was in the New Hampshire House Bradley was fairly liberal on social issues, but since coming to Washington he has voted to ban “partial-birth” abortions, even when the mother's health is at risk. He's also voted to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage, and he opposed a simple motion that would “bar fathers who have committed rape or incest against a minor that resulted in a pregnancy from being able to sue the doctor who performed the abortion.”

Indeed, just a month ago a Union Leader editorial (likely written by Cline, who pens most of the paper's editorials) praised Bradley for being the only member of the state delegation to oppose a bill that would have raised the minimum wage—which hasn't been lifted in nearly a decade and whose real buying power is at its lowest point since 1955. “Who'd have thought he'd one day outconservative Sens. Gregg and Sununu?” the editorial asked.

Cline described me as arguing that Bradley had cast votes to “line his own pockets,” which allowed him to demolish a case that I didn't make. In fact, I specifically stated that “Bradley is a very wealthy man, and it's not likely that he reads the stock tables before voting,” but said that given his vast investments and the fact that he regularly casts votes that have an impact on his fortune, he should put his money in a blind trust. That's an argument that neither the Union Leader nor Bradley have yet to address. I wonder why not?

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