Hillary's Defenders
Carlson, Tucker
Hillary's Defenders by Tucker Carlson Not everybody dislikes Hillary Rodham Clinton, even if her approval rating is now the lowest ever recorded for a president's wife. The First Lady does have...
...I wouldn't call it a transgression...
...Like, we don't have an actual Back to Business office," is how Stacy Beck, whose name is listed on the group's press releases, describes the situation...
...Instead, the for-profit "committee," which has no dues-paying members, is located in the starkly modern offices of the Kamber Group, a liberal public relations firm in downtown Washington headed by a former organized-labor official named Victor Kamber...
...Davis's staff, Cutler bravely insisted at the time, "could have been returning a call...
...The 57-year-old Cutler has been playing flack to embattled Democratic leaders since before many current White House staffers were out of high school...
...For one thing, the Back to Business Committee doesn't actually exist, at least not in the strict physical sense...
...When she isn't crying bigotry, Cutler likes to trot out what might be called the "America can't take a strong woman" thesis...
...Kamber's director of media relations, Enid Doggett, worked on the 1992 Clinton campaign...
...As Cutler later explained to the Washington Post, "He's for school prayer...
...As a DNC official in 1987, Cutler defended California controller Gray Davis (now the state's lieutenant governor), who had been accused of using state phones to make long-distance fund-raising pitches, including several to the Kamber Group...
...Clinton in earnest...
...Cutler claims the committee has other chartered officers, but can't remember their names...
...This is so typical," Cutler remarked to old friend and Washington Post columnist Judy Mann (who has promoted Cutler in no fewer than 14 separate columns for the newspaper...
...For Back to Business chairman Cutler, such bareknuckle lobbying comes naturally...
...One of her favorite ideological hip checks is throwing charges of bigotry at her political enemies...
...Asked to explain the confusing arrangement, Stacy Beck pleads confusion: "You're getting into technicalities that are a little too complicated for me...
...Kamber executive Don Sweitzer, who has appeared on television several times in the past few weeks representing the committee, was until recently the political director of another committee-the Democratic National Committee...
...Only it's not quite accurate...
...Like Lynn Cutler, the firm's head, Victor Kamber, has a history of coming to the aid of Democrats in trouble...
...Fed Up Hillary Pals Fight Back-it makes a good headline...
...After losing two campaigns for Congress, she relocated to Washington and spent much of the 1980s helping to run the DNC...
...The Kamber Group, one of the biggest firms of its kind in the city, handles nearly all of the committee's operations, which makes Lynn Cutler, as an executive of both organizations, her own client...
...In 1994, she wrote the now-infamous fundraising letter for Dianne Feinstein, in which she implied that Feinstein's opponent in the California Senate race, Michael Huffington, was an anti-Semite...
...The service Barney Frank has provided to this country cannot be overshadowed by this one incident," Cutler told the press...
...Neel Lattimore, Hillary Clinton's spokesman and a man keenly interested in the work of the Back to Business Committee, spent three years as a Kamber employee...
...It's everybody...
...Strong woman stands up, speaks out, moves forward, bam...
...Like the designated brawler on a losing hockey team, Cutler often makes up in aggression what she lacks in substance...
...Such dogged loyalty to the party has brought Cutler a long way since 1981, when she was a county commissioner in Waterloo, Iowa...
...Cutler has spent much of the last two years hopping from talk show to newspaper interview in defense of Hillary Clinton, doing her best to explain away the details of the Whitewater and travel office scandals, while at the same time denouncing the current Senate investigation as a right-wing witch hunt...
...This is not just Hillary under attack here...
...But Cutler is not easily stymied...
...To hear chairman Lynn Cutler tell it, Back to Business is a grassroots operation, the result of a spontaneous outpouring of support for Hillary from women all over the country who are incensed by her treatment at the hands of Republican inquisitors...
...And he's not in favor of a woman's right to choose abortion...
...Maybe, but if the committee itself doesn't have ties to the White House, the people who work for it do...
...Huffington, she wrote, "represents everything that is antithetical to us as women and as Jews...
...The Kamber Group may have been the natural choice for the job of defending Hillary Clinton...
...Conservative philanthropist Richard Scaife, who has funded investigations into Whitewater and Vince Foster's death, is described as a "right-wing sugar daddy extraordinaire...
...Her evidence...
...The list of Kamber Group employees reads like a Democratic party alumni directory...
...The First Lady does have her defenders, and two years ago, a number of them got together and formed an organization called the Back to Business Committee...
...Lynn Cutler herself worked for 12 years as vice chairman of the DNC...
...Bold headlines invite readers to learn about the "Scaife-Gingrich Connection" and Senator Alfonse "D'Amato's Ties to the Mob...
...The group's literature does its best to set matters straight...
...The congressman was later convicted and sentenced to three years in prison...
...Cutler says that the firm landed a major contract with the DNC about six months ago-not long after the Back to Business Committee had begun to defend Mrs...
...Two years later, in 1989, Cutler came to the aid of Rep...
...The latest attacks on the First Lady by "Al D'Amato et al.," she declares, are nothing less than a "pogrom...
...Barney Frank (brother of former Back to Business chairman Ann Lewis) when the congressman was found to have a male prostitution business operating out of his Washington townhouse...
...Indeed, determining where the Kamber Group ends and the Back to Business Committee begins is no simple task...
...The literature that the Kamber Group/Back to Business Committee puts out-in press releases and on its site on the Internet-can sound a little intemperate...
...It was Kamber, after all, who in 1980 directed the Citizens Committee for Frank Thompson's Defense, a group dedicated to helping the New Jersey congressman beat charges that he took bribes in the Abscam sting...
...Not to mention the Kamber Group itself, which has significant financial ties to the Democratic party...
...Unfortunately for Thompson, Kamber's help didn't do much good...
...The committee's chairman and only apparent corporate officer, Lynn Cutler, is also vice president and a long-time employee of the group...
...Back to Business is an organization of Democrats," it says, "with no official connection to either the Democratic Party or the Clinton Administration...
...Needless to say, it has been a tougher assignment to cast the Protestant Hillary Clinton as a victim of anti-Jewish prejudice...
Vol. 1 • January 1996 • No. 19
