Clinton, obviously, was the last Democratic president to try to fix the country's healthcare system. Senators said he didn't spend much time dwelling on how the process did or didn't work in 1993 and 1994, but he did remind them that opportunities for reform don't come up that often.

Democrats are still grappling with questions about what kind of public option the Senate's healthcare bill should have, how to handle the abortion restrictions the House put into its bill and how to pay for some of the costs of the legislation. But Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., told Salon Clinton didn't get into any of that, preferring to focus on the big picture. Though Clinton took a few questions from senators after speaking, none of them dealt with healthcare, Cardin said.

The former president's Secret Service detail, and the Capitol Police, blocked off several hallways as Clinton left the lunch, but that didn't stop a large crowd from gathering on the second floor, hoping to get a glimpse of, or catch a few words from, him. Clinton obliged, staying for about 10 minutes to take questions from reporters and generally bask in the attention before aides shuttled him out of the building.

That failure, and the consequences it had for the Democrats at the ballot box -- Republicans took back both houses of Congress -- are likely to be the key parts of Clinton's message Tuesday. The idea, of course, is that Democrats in moderate and conservative states who are scared of political costs for backing their party's proposals should remember that not passing a bill can be just as dangerous.

It's a good message to send, and one that might be convincing. There's one hitch, though -- senators serve six-year terms. That means only three senators who are potential swing votes are up for reelection in 2010, while some of the bigger names on the fence, like Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, have some time yet before they have to run again.

He is a man of perpetual promise. There used to be a cruel joke that said Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be; Obama is the Brazil of today's politicians. He has obviously achieved nothing. And in the American context, to be the hero of five Norwegian leftists, is not exactly politically positive.

It hardly makes sense to blame him for losing the Olympic bid in one week, and then for winning the Nobel Prize the next.

He should have simply said: "This is very nice, I appreciate the gesture, but I haven't achieved what I want to achieve." But he is not the kind of man that does that.

Should he have turned down the prize?

He would never turn that down. The presidency is all about him. Just think about the speech he gave in Berlin. There is something so preposterous about a presidential candidate speaking in Berlin. And it was replete with all these universalist clichés, which is basically what he's been giving us for nine months.

Why do Europeans react so positively to him?

Because Europe, for very understandable reasons, has been chafing for 60 years under the protection, but also the subtle or not so subtle domination of America. Europeans like to see the big guy cut down to size, it's a natural reaction. You know, Europe ran the world for 400 or 500 years until the civilizational suicide of the two World Wars. And then America emerged as the world hegemon, with no competition and unchallenged. The irony is America is the only hegemonic power that never sought hegemony, unlike, for example, Napoleonic France. Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are. Of course Europeans like to see the hegemon diminished, and Obama is the perfect man to do that.

Maybe Europeans want to just see a different America, one they can admire again.

Admire? Look at Obama's speech at the U.N. General Assembly: "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." Take the first half of that sentence: No nation can dominate another. There is no 8-year-old who would say that -- it's so absurd. And the second half? That is adolescent utopianism. Obama talks in platitudes, but offers a vision to the world of America diminished or constrained, and willing to share leadership in a way that no other presidency and no other great power would. Could you imagine if the Russians were hegemonic, or the Chinese, or the Germans -- that they would speak like this?

Is America's power not already diminished?

Relative to what?

To emerging powers.

The Chinese are rising, the Indians have a very long way to go. But I'm old enough to remember the late 1980s, "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" by Paul Kennedy and the prevailing view that America was in decline and Japan was the rising power. The fashion now is that the Chinese will overtake the United States. As with the great Japan panic, there are all kinds of reasons why that will not happen.

Look, eventually American hegemony will fade. In time, yes. But now? Economically we now have serious problems, creating huge amounts of debt that we cannot afford and that could bring down the dollar and even cause hyperinflation. But nothing is inevitable. If we make the right choices, if we keep our economic house in order, we can avert an economic collapse. We can choose to decline or to stay strong.

Do you really believe that Obama deliberately wants to weaken the U.S.?

The liberal vision of America is that it should be less arrogant, less unilateral, more internationalist. In Obama's view, America would subsume itself under a fuzzy internationalism in which the international community, which I think is a fiction, governs itself through the U.N.

A nightmare?

Worse than that: an absurdity. I can't even imagine serious people would believe it, but I think Obama does. There is a way America will decline -- if we choose first to wreck our economy and then to constrain our freedom of action through subordinating ourselves to international institutions which are 90 percent worthless and 10 percent harmful.

And there is not even 1 percent that is constructive?

No. The U.N. is worse than disaster. The U.N. creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful U.N. Human Rights Council: It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty and anti-Semitic among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.

And Obama is, in your eyes …

He's becoming ordinary. In the course of his presidency, Obama has gone from an almost magical charismatic figure to an ordinary politician. Ordinary. Average. His approval ratings are roughly equal to what the last five presidents' were at the same time in their first term. Other people have already said he's done and finished because his healthcare plans ran into trouble; but I say they're wrong. He's going to come back, he will pass something on healthcare, there's no question. He will have a blip, be somewhat rehabilitated politically, but he won't be able to pass anything on climate change. He will not be the great transformer he imagines himself to be. A president like others -- with successes and failures.

Every incoming president to the White House has to confront reality and disappoint voters.

True. But what made Obama unique was that he was the ultimate charismatic politician -- the most unknown stranger ever to achieve the presidency in the United States. No one knew who he was, he came out of nowhere, he had this incredible persona that floated him above the fray, destroyed Hillary, took over the Democratic Party and became president. This is truly unprecedented: a young unknown with no history, no paper trail, no well-known associates, self-created.

There was tremendous goodwill, even I was thrilled on Election Day, even though I had voted against him and argued against him.

What moved you that day?

It's redemptive for a country that began in the sin of slavery to see the day, I didn't think I would live to see the day, when a black president would be elected.

Now he was not my candidate. I would have preferred the first black president to have been somebody ideologically congenial to me, say, Colin Powell (whom I encouraged to run in 2000) or Condoleezza Rice. But I felt truly proud to be an American as I saw him sworn in. I remain proud of this historic achievement.

What major mistakes has Obama made?

I don't know whether I should call it a mistake, but it turns out he is a left-liberal, not center-right the way Bill Clinton was. The analogy I give is that in America we play the game between the 40-yard lines, in Europe you go all the way from goal line to goal line. You have communist parties, you have fascist parties, we don't have that, we have very centrist parties.

So Obama wants to push us to the 30-yard line, which for America is pretty far. Right after he was elected, he gave an address to Congress and promised to basically remake the basic pillars of American society -- education , energy and healthcare. All this would move America toward a social democratic European-style state. It is outside of the norm of America.

Yet, he had promised these reforms during the campaign.

Hardly. He's now pushing a cap-and-trade energy reform. During the campaign he said that would cause skyrocketing utility rates. On healthcare, the reason he's had such resistance is because he promised reform, not a radical remaking of the whole system.

So he didn't see the massive resistance coming?

Obama misread his mandate. He was elected six weeks after a financial collapse unlike any seen in 60 years; after eight years of a presidency which had tired the country; in the middle of two wars that made the country opposed to the Republican government that involved us in the wars; and against a completely inept opponent, John McCain. Nevertheless, Obama still only won by 7 points. But he thought it was a great sweeping mandate and he could implement his social democratic agenda.

Part of the problem when it comes to healthcare is the lack of solidarity in the American way of thinking. Can a president change a country?

Yes. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Back then, we didn't have a welfare state, we didn't have old-age pensions, we didn't have unemployment insurance. This country was the Wild West until FDR. Yes, you can change the spirit of America.

If Obama is so radical, why is the left wing of the Democratic Party so unhappy with him?

They are disillusioned because he has ignored some of their social agenda, such as gay rights; continued some of the Bush policies he had once denounced, such as the detention without trial for terrorists; and on his large agenda for education and energy, where he has had no success.

How could Obama still win Republican support for healthcare reform?

He should finally realize that we need to reform our insane malpractice system. The U.S. is spending between $60 billion  and $200 billion a year on protection against lawsuits. I used to be a doctor, I know how much is wasted on defensive medicine. Everybody I practiced with spends hours and enormous amounts of money on wasted tests, diagnostic and procedures -- all to avoid lawsuits. The Democrats will not touch it. When Howard Dean was asked why, he said honestly and explicitly that Democrats don't want to antagonize the trial lawyers who donate huge amounts of money to the Democrats.

What would be your solution?

I would make Americans pay half a percent tax on their health insurance and create a pool to socialize the cost of medical errors. That would save hundreds of billions of dollars that could be used to insure the uninsured. And second, I would abolish the absurd prohibition against buying health insurance in another state -- that reduces competition and keeps health insurance rates artificially high.

But you also need to cut back on healthcare expenses.

It is absolutely crazy that in America employees receive health insurance from their employers -- and at the same time a tax break for this from the federal government. It's a $250 billion a year loophole in the government's budget. If you taxed healthcare benefits, you would have enough revenue for the government to give back to the individual to purchase their own insurance. If you did those two reforms alone, you would have the basis for affordable health insurance in America.

What the Democrats seem to be aiming for, however, is something somewhat different: the government gets control of the healthcare system by proxy; you heavily regulate the insurance companies, you subsidize the uninsured. That kind of reform would also work, but less efficiently -- and because of its unsustainable costs, we would, in the end, have to go to a system of rationing, the way the British do, the way the Canadians do, there is no other way. Obama can't say any of that, the word rationing is too unpopular.

Mr. Krauthammer, can a Nobel Peace Prize winner send more troops to Afghanistan?

Sure, I don't see why not. The prize could have two contrary effects. It could give him an incentive to send more troops to show his own people that he is not an instrument of five Norwegian leftists. Or it can work the other way where in order not to lose the popularity he obviously feels from Europe, he would be less inclined. I think whatever impulses come out of those considerations neutralize each other. The prize will have zero effect on his decision.

Part 2: "What the Obama administration pretends is realism is naïve nonsense"

You have called him a "young Hamlet" over his hesitation about making a decision on Afghanistan. However, he's just carefully considering the options after Bush shot so often from the hip.

No. The strategy he's revising is not the Bush strategy, it's the Obama strategy. On March 27, he stood there with a background of flags, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on one side and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the other, and said: "Today, I'm announcing a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." So don't tell me this is revising eight years of Bush, he's not. For all these weeks and months he's been revising his own strategy, and that's OK, you're allowed to do that. But if you're president and you're commander in chief, and your guys are getting shot and killed in the field, and you think "maybe the strategy I myself announced with great fanfare six months ago needs to be revised," do it in quiet. Don't show the world that you're utterly at sea and have no idea what to do! Your European allies already are skittish and reluctant, and wondering whether they ought to go ahead. It's your own strategy, if it's not working, then you revise it and fix it. You just don't demoralize your allies.

Is Afghanistan still a war of necessity, still a strategic interest?

The phrase "war of necessity and war of choice" is a phrase that came out of a different context. Milan Kundera once wrote, "a small country is a country that can disappear and knows it." He was thinking of prewar Czechoslovakia. Israel is a country that can disappear and knows it. America, Germany, France, Britain are not countries that can disappear. They can be defeated but they cannot disappear. For the great powers, and especially for the world superpower, very few wars are wars of necessity. In theory, America could adopt a foreign policy of isolationism and survive. We could fight nowhere, withdraw from everywhere -- South Korea, Germany, Japan, NATO, the United Nations -- if we so chose. From that perspective, every war since World War II has been a war of choice.

So using those categories -- wars of necessity, wars of choice -- is unhelpful in thinking through contemporary American intervention. In Afghanistan the question is: Do the dangers of leaving exceed the dangers of staying.

Gen. Stanley McCrystal is asking for more troops. Is that really the right strategy?

Gen. Stanley McCrystal is the world expert on counterterrorism. For five years he ran the most successful counterterrorism operation probably in the history of the world: His guys went after the bad guys in Iraq, they ran special ops, they used the Predators and they killed thousands of jihadists that we don't even know about, it was all under the radar. And now this same general tells Obama that the counterterrorism strategy in Afghanistan will fail, you have to do counterinsurgency, population protection. That would seem an extremely persuasive case that counterterrorism would not work.

You famously coined the term "Reagan Doctrine" to describe Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. What is the "Obama Doctrine"?

I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naive that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word "doctrine."

Are you saying that diplomacy always fails?

No, foolishness does. Perhaps when he gets nowhere on Iran, nowhere with North Korea, when he gets nothing from the Russians in return for what he did to the Poles and the Czechs, gets nowhere in the Middle East peace talks -- maybe at that point he'll begin to rethink whether the world really runs by international norms, consensus, and sweetness and light, or whether it rests on the foundation of American and Western power that, in the final analysis, guarantees peace.

That is the cynical approach.

The realist approach. Henry Kissinger once said that peace can be achieved only one of two ways: hegemony or balance of power. Now that is real realism. What the Obama administration pretends is realism is naive nonsense.

How do you solve problems like climate change if international institutions are failing?

It's not the institution that does it, it's the confluence of interests. Where there is a confluence of interests among nations, as, for example, the swine flu or polio, you can get well-functioning international institutions like the World Health Organization. And you can act. Climate change is different, because the science remains hypothetical and the potential costs staggering.

You think it's a speculative theory?

My own view is that there is man-made warming. On several occasions I have written that I don't think you can pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere indefinitely and not have a reaction. But there are great scientists such as Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists of the last hundred years, who has studied the question, who believes quite the opposite. The reason transnational action is so difficult is because the major problem with climate change is, A) that there is no consensus, and, B) that the economic cost is simply staggering. Reversing it completely might mean undoing the modern industrial economy.

I'm not against international institutions that would try to tackle it. But the way to go, at least in the short run, is to go to nuclear power. It's amazing to me that people who are so alarmed about global warming are so reluctant to adopt the obvious short-term solution -- the bridge until the day when we have affordable renewable energy -- of nuclear power. It seems to me intellectually dishonest. Nuclear is obviously not the final answer because it produces its own waste -- but you have a choice. There's no free lunch. If you want an industrial economy, you need energy. If you want energy, it will produce pollution. You can have it in two forms. You can have it dissipated in the atmosphere -- like carbon dioxide -- which then you cannot recover, or you can have the waste concentrated in one small space like nuclear. That is far easier to deal with. The idea that you can be able to create renewable energy at a price anywhere near the current price for oil or gas or coal is a fantasy.

Do you basically think Obama is going to be a one-term president?

No, I think he has a very good chance of being reelected. For two reasons. First, there's no real candidate on the other side, and you can't beat something with nothing. Secondly, it'll depend on the economy -- and just from American history, in the normal economic cycles, presidents who have their recessions at the beginning of their first term get reelected (Reagan, Clinton, the second Bush), and presidents who have them at the end of their first term don't (Carter, the first Bush). Obama will lose a lot of seats in next year's congressional election, but the economy should be on the upswing in 2012.

Is the conservative movement in the United States in decline?

When George W. Bush won in 2004, there was lots of stuff written about the end of liberalism and the death of the Democratic Party. Look where we are now.

A Democrat is back in the White House, the party also controls Congress.

Exactly. We see the usual overreading of history whenever one side loses. Look, there are cycles in American politics. U.S. cycles are even more pronounced because we Americans have a totally entrepreneurial residential system. We don't have parliamentary opposition parties with a shadow prime minister and shadow cabinets. Every four years, the opposition reinvents itself. We have no idea who will be the Republican nominee in 2012. The party structures are very fluid. We have a history of political parties being thrown out of the White House after two terms -- as has happened every single time with only one exception (Ronald Reagan) since World War II. The idea that one party is done in the U.S. is silly. The Republicans got killed in 2006 and 2008, but they will be back.

The party lacks a strong, intelligent leader.

Yes. And if the Republicans don't have one by 2012, they'll lose and they'll have to wait till 2016. It could take eight years to develop. You know, people say -- the White House was pushing this idea -- that the radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the opposition because there's no other leader. Well, ask yourself, in 2001 and 2002 and 2003, who was the leader of the Democratic Party? There was none. We don't have a parliamentary system in which opposition leaders are designated.

Some people say you're that leader.

I'm just getting to an age where a lot of my contemporaries are retiring or dying. So I'm on default a voice of authority. I don't attribute very much to that. 

Who will be the next leader of the Republican Party?

Some presidential candidates from last year will return in 2012. Sarah Palin is not a serious contender, but somebody like Mitt Romney will be. He is a serious guy, he understands the economy. There will also be some young people many haven't yet heard about, such as Rep. Paul Ryan or Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Or outsiders like the mastermind behind the surge in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, who might retire from the military and run for president on the Republican ticket.

Many people, however, currently think the Republicans are the party of "no."

That perception is a serious problem for them.

At the end of Bush's second term, he granted you a long interview. Afterward, you wrote that history would judge Bush kindly. Why?

Basically I think Bush will have the same historical rehabilitation that Harry Truman did.

And why is that?

Truman left in the middle of an unpopular war, to use your phrase, a war of choice. Truman didn't have to go into South Korea. And he was reviled and ridiculed for the stalemate that resulted. Now, he's seen as one of the great presidents of the 20th century.

I think Bush actually handled the Iraq war better than Truman handled the Korean War. For one thing, the number of losses is about one-tenth. Secondly, he made the right decision with the surge. Thirdly, if Iraq turns out well, meaning becomes a country fairly self-sufficient and fairly friendly to the West, it will have a more important effect on the West than having a non-communist South Korea. The Middle East is strategically a far more important region.

Bush's worst mistake was the conduct of the Iraq war in the middle years -- 2004-2006 -- and the attempt to win on the cheap, with a light footprint.

On the other hand, I think he did exactly the right thing after 9/11. Look at the Patriot Act, which revolutionized how we deal with domestic terrorism, passed within six weeks of 9/11 in the fury of the moment. Testimony to how well Bush got it right is that Democrats, who now control Congress and had been highly critical of it, are now after eight years reauthorizing it with almost no significant changes.

Afghanistan is more problematic. Our success in overthrowing the Taliban in 100 days was remarkable. It's one of the great military achievements of all time. On the other hand, holding Afghanistan is a lot harder than taking it, and to this day we are not sure how to do it. But the initial success in 2001-2002 did decimate and scatter al-Qaida. It is no accident that we have not suffered a second attack -- something no one who lived in Washington on Sept. 11 thought possible.

I'm sure he will be rehabilitated in the long term.

Clare Booth Luce once said that every president is remembered for one thing, and that's what Bush will be remembered for. He kept us safe.

Is it too early to foresee what Obama will be remembered for?

It is quite early. It could be his election.

Mr. Krauthammer, we thank you for this interview. 

At this late date, it is scarcely radical to suggest that Whitewater and all the other "scandals" deployed by the Washington press corps to besiege the Clinton White House (before the Lewinsky affair) were without substance. In the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, which created and promoted those stories, even such media mandarins as Thomas Friedman and Evan Thomas now casually assure us that they were overblown, even "bogus." And former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan today admits that the famous takedown of the Clinton healthcare reforms he published in 1994, Betsy McCaughey's "No Exit," was essentially a fake too.

Belated as those affirmations are, by more than a decade, they may still matter -- if only because they arrive at a time when the mainstream media is just beginning to descend into some of the same bad habits that plagued us during the last Democratic presidency and the far right is already talking impeachment.

Let us start with Friedman, who wrote a column on Sept. 30 bemoaning the diseased condition of political discourse in America and tracing the dangerous pathology back to its origin. "The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater 'scandal,'" he wrote. Presumably he used those scare quotes to suggest just how fraudulent the whole business was, as if "bogus" didn't quite do it -- and true enough, as far as it goes.

But it doesn't go far enough, because as Friedman knows very well, the right was not alone in hounding the Clintons -- and wouldn't have achieved traction without the journalistic assistance and moral support provided by the Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, the New Republic and the rest of Washington's press establishment, followed slavishly by their intellectual imitators on network and cable television.

Back then Friedman's own Times Op-Ed column rarely mentioned Whitewater or the Clinton scandals, but he remained agreeably silent while the most avid perpetrators of scandal nonsense, such as the late Safire and Maureen Dowd, transformed the paper of record into a megaphone for the president's adversaries. Unlike Anthony Lewis, who bravely argued with the harshly negative Times party line on Clinton and the scandals, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent never wrote a word that could be construed as dissent. (Bob Somerby performed the Nexis search and offers much more on this subject in his trenchant Daily Howler commentaries.) Coming from him, "bogus" should be taken as a verdict not only on the scandals but on the scandal-mongering in the news, opinion and editorial columns of his newspaper -- and on his own failure to speak up when that might have made a difference.

Still, it is bracing to see that pithy epithet applied to the works of Kenneth Starr and the journalists who served as his lackeys in the Times' own pages. By comparison, Evan Thomas sounded squishy in his own recent belittling of the scandals, when he reviewed "The Clinton Tapes" for the Washington Post -- but then he has considerably more to answer for than Friedman.

Although he was trying no doubt to sound magisterial rather than mealy-mouthed, Thomas was unable to discuss past disgraces in any but the most indirect and evasive terms. Consider this passage, which follows a flip reference to Clinton's moaning and ranting in self-pity as he coped with the hostile press corps:

"Today, when the mainstream media seems so weakened, we forget how powerful -- and arrogant -- the New York Times and The Washington Post, along with the networks and news magazines, seemed to be in the early and mid-1990s. They were part of a giant scandal machine that dominated official Washington in the first few years after the Cold War. The endless string of special prosecutors and the media's obsession with Whitewater seem excessive in retrospect."

To some of us the obsession seemed excessive at the time, of course, which only enraged the likes of Thomas whenever we said so. (And isn't an obsession excessive by definition?) The true obsession among reporters was not the boring Whitewater land deal, as Thomas notes, but the "rumors of 'bimbo eruptions' floated by political enemies and less-than-reliable state troopers." Is he confessing his own fixation on Clinton's private life or merely recalling the unwholesome preoccupations of his colleagues? 

Like all of them, Thomas certainly pretended to care about Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and all those other forgettable tall tales. What is remarkable now, however, is how smoothly he attempts to dissociate himself from the relentless scandal machine that he actually helped to operate. (Among his signed pieces, Thomas himself once wrote a fawning apology to Paula Jones that looks even sillier today than at the time he published it.) To put it bluntly, he served as a top editor at Newsweek when that periodical was Kenneth Starr's most favored outlet.

A low point was the magazine's December 1996 cover story, which dramatically featured the prosecutor's promise to "deliver" justice in five scandals supposedly percolating in the Clinton White House. With the "extraordinary access" provided by Starr, Newsweek declared breathlessly that within the coming months he would "decide whether to bring indictments that could very possibly alter the course of Bill Clinton's second term." A helpful sidebar on potential criminal acts attributed to the Clintons and their aides accompanied the exclusive Starr interview.

What Starr actually delivered, only eight weeks later, was his own resignation as special prosecutor -- to take a deanship at Pepperdine University (financed by Clinton nemesis Richard Mellon Scaife) in a deal that he had been negotiating for months. He had nothing, but he punked the Newsweek boys. (Under intense pressure from the right, notably the late William Safire writing in the New York Times, Starr quickly withdrew his resignation and continued as independent counsel until 1999.)

Finally there is Andrew Sullivan, whose disservices to journalism as editor of the New Republic were many and varied in the Clinton years, vicious in personal tone and ersatz in journalistic content. In April 1994, for instance, he published a highbrow version of "The Clinton Chronicles" titled "The Name of Rose," which portrayed Arkansas government as a third-world-style criminal enterprise directed by the Clintons with the connivance of the Rose Law Firm, Stephens Inc. and a supporting cast of shadowy, sinister Pakistanis and Indonesians. It was all nonsense but it played well in Washington's scandal culture -- and it gave respectable license to the Republican right's crusade to vilify the Clintons.

For Sullivan the high point of Clinton-bashing came with the publication of "No Exit," McCaughey's takedown of the new administration's healthcare reform proposals. Lately McCaughey has popped up again as the source of the fraudulent "death panel" allegations against President Obama's healthcare reform plan -- and that in turn has revived scrutiny of the myriad inaccuracies and blatant falsehoods in her 1994 New Republic article (which the magazine's editors have disowned).

Having boasted proudly that by publishing McCaughey he helped to destroy the Clinton plan, and having accepted a National Magazine Award for doing so, Sullivan now says he is sorry about all that. He professes to take "full responsibility" for publishing an article that he knew to be false in its particulars and its broader argument -- but, in fact, smarmily seeks to blame someone higher up (in addition to McCaughey herself) who supposedly forced him to run the piece. That would have to be Martin Peretz, who then owned the New Republic and advertised himself as "editor in chief."

If what Sullivan says is true, then the least he and Peretz should do is return the National Magazine Award, for the sake of the journalists and editors who have honestly earned that prize. That gesture might restore a semblance of sanity to the debate over healthcare.

As for the responsible parties at the Times, the Post, Newsweek and all the others, like Friedman and Thomas, who feel residual guilt over the Clinton scandals, there is still time to confront the past honestly. Fessing up is hard to do. But at a moment when the New York Times and the Washington Post again seem eager to grovel to the far right, it is worth recalling where that same impulse led during the Clinton years. 

Whether Clinton is correct about the current condition of his old adversaries can best be measured by the passage or wreckage of healthcare reform and the outcome of next year's congressional midterm elections -- the same early milestones that marked the beginning of Clinton's tumultuous White House tenure. Perhaps Barack Obama will be saved by political demography and decent intentions, as the former president tried to assure Gregory; perhaps he and his administration will prove less vulnerable to intrigue and propaganda and less flawed than their predecessors.

What Obama should anticipate -- indeed, what he is already encountering -- is a cascade of slurs, threats and rhetorical violence that reanimates all of the worst themes of the bad old days. That wave will inevitably damage the president and his hopes for change, even if the majority of Americans is less receptive to right-wing messages than they once were. The greasy machinery once used to grind Clinton down has grown larger and more sophisticated by orders of magnitude, from Fox News Channel (which did not exist during his first term) to all of the conservative digital outlets that enable echoing and organizing on a truly vast scale.

The negative mythologizing of Obama bears a remarkable resemblance in tone and style if not precisely in content to the attacks on Clinton. "It's like when they accused me of murder, and all that stuff they did," said the former president -- presumably a reference to the wilder fantasies circulated in conservative publications about Obama, from the forged Kenyan birth certificates to the president's supposed plans to inflict corruption, homosexual radicals and Muslim jihad on innocent Americans. While some of the current themes mimic those deployed against Clinton, there are generational differences and the obvious fact that Obama is not just notionally "the first black president." That status evokes a special animus on the far right, of course -- although Clinton at least had earned the lifelong hatred of his most dedicated enemy, "Justice Jim" Johnson of Arkansas, for fighting segregation and racism in Arkansas.

Back when videotapes still had to be circulated by mail order, the Clinton-hunters did a brisk business with "The Clinton Chronicles," a "documentary" alleging that as governor of Arkansas he oversaw an enormous, unchecked racketeering enterprise that encompassed international bank fraud, cocaine smuggling and multiple murders, facilitated by a kind of backwoods dictatorship. Nothing resembling that remarkable work of extremist art, once promoted by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, has appeared so far in the crusade against Obama -- but that doesn't mean nothing is in the works. Many of the same organizations and operatives behind the original Clinton smears are still active and some have amassed considerable wealth and influence over the intervening decade.

The signs of a resurgent right-wing smear industry, and the role that would be played by the old VRWC in the Obama era, first became clear toward the end of last year's historic election. Suddenly in the final months of the campaign, long after conservatives had despaired of another Swift-boat triumph, a curious outfit called the National Republican Trust PAC emerged from the shadows with two exceptionally nasty independent commercials -- and millions of dollars to spend airing them. Between the end of September and Election Day, the mysterious NRT PAC raised and spent enough money to qualify as the single largest non-party purchaser of airtime in the 2008 election.

Using a photo of Mohammed Atta, the first NRT ad connected Obama to the 9/11 hijackers with the false claim that he wanted to permit illegal immigrants to get drivers licenses. FactCheck.org described that ad as "one of the sleaziest false TV ads of the campaign." The second ad attempted to remind voters about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor at the Chicago church where the Obama family worshiped, whose black nationalist sermons caused them to break with him during the presidential campaign. The script criticized Obama for failing to protest Wright's sermons sooner and warned that the Democrat was "too radical" and "too risky."

These blunt instruments of political warfare were less interesting than their creators. The executive director of NRT PAC, responsible for the production of those ads, was Scott Wheeler -- who had worked, years before, on the making of "The Clinton Chronicles," according to reporter Murray Waas. Behind Wheeler was the mastermind of the NRT PAC and one of the central figures in the anti-Clinton network of the '90s: Christopher Ruddy.

Now editor and publisher of Newsmax, the enormously successful right-wing magazine and Web site, Ruddy was the journalist who spun the most fanciful theories about the death of Clinton White House lawyer Vince Foster. Working at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, owned by billionaire and avowed Clinton foe Richard Mellon Scaife, Ruddy popularized the canard that Foster had not committed suicide, as determined by five official investigations, but more likely had been murdered -- possibly to cover up corruption in the Whitewater land deal or because of an illicit affair with Hillary Rodham Clinton or both.

Beyond spreading paranoia about the Foster tragedy, Ruddy and Scaife both played central roles in the distribution of nearly half a million copies of "The Clinton Chronicles" and other covert machinations against the Clinton White House –- most notably the "Arkansas Project," a $2.4 million scheme to dig up or invent crimes by the president and first lady, with assistance from several unsavory characters, including die-hard segregationist Jim Johnson, a couple of private detectives and a bait-shop owner.

Ten years later, life has changed for Ruddy and Scaife. They're partners in Newsmax, based in West Palm Beach, Fla., and now the largest conservative publication in the country, both online and off. With 130,000 print subscribers its circulation is nearly twice as large as the Weekly Standard, and with nearly 4 million unique monthly visitors to Newsmax.com, it is larger than the Drudge Report. According to Forbes, which profiled Newsmax last spring, the low-budget site and its affiliates brought in nearly $30 million last year. More important than its profits is its sway over conservative readers.

Newsmax is a muscular media presence with influence across the right from Rush Limbaugh and all his radio imitators to Fox News Channel and beyond. Ruddy was among the most insistent endorsers of the Obama birth certificate myth, playing much the same role he once did during the Vince Foster affair. He has assiduously promoted the "tea party" movement and the "socialism" meme. When Newsmax published an essay by an obscure former newsman that seemed to urge a military coup against Obama last week (and then removed it), the reverberations were felt across the political spectrum. Every day the site blasts forth a barrage of supposed Obama scandals and embarrassments to be amplified by Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the panoply of talk radio and cable megaphones, knowing that by sheer volume, some of it will stick.

Combining the propaganda power of Newsmax with the spending power of the NRT PAC, the once-laughable Ruddy could become a formidable player in the 2010 midterm elections -– and the fate of the Obama administration.

As Clinton himself pointed out, the same forces that wanted to defeat and destroy his administration have predictably mobilized against Obama. For the moment, however, those forces cannot muster the same kind of concerted attack that almost brought Clinton down. They may still have Scaife's money but they have no independent counsel, like the partisan zealot Kenneth Starr. They have no scandal-mongering allies in the mainstream media, like the late William Safire of the New York Times. They have no congressional majority, and nobody like Newt Gingrich to build and lead one -- at least not yet.

Yet while the Republican right struggles for credibility, leaving Obama with breathing space, he and his aides ought to reconsider their scornful and high-handed attitude toward the progressive wing of their own party. They might just lose the Democratic majority next year and find themselves facing the sharp end of a series of congressional investigations or worse. If and when that happens, as Clinton could remind them, the progressives will be their only reliable allies.