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"FacebookPinterest\n\nOn a screen in a back room of an upscale Dallas restaurant, a cartoon version of Hillary Clinton veers between bored and apoplectic. In the cartoon, in which she hosts a late-night program called The Hillary Show, her teeth are pointed, resembling fangs. She mocks everyone she comes across (including her \"sidekick,\" Howard Dean) and exhibits her violent streak by leaping out of a chair to bash Al Gore over the head with a wooden mallet, the \"Hillary Hammer.\"\n\n\"Another loser,\" she says.\n\nA knowing chuckle spreads through the audience of about fifteen local Republican activists and donors, including an associate of Karl Rove.  Many of the attendees, mostly middle-aged and mild-mannered, wear nametags and anti-Hillary buttons on their suit lapels and silk blouses. The lights come on, and a tall, youthful 60-year-old man steps in front of the screen. Across his gray suit and broad yellow tie the projector beams Hillary's scowling face and a White House seeped in bloody red.\n\n \"Wanted to reach out and involve you in our effort\u2014in our Web site,\" Dick Collins, a veteran Republican fund-raiser, says in his languid Texas drawl. He favorably compares his Stop Her Now Web site\u2014a clearinghouse of anti-Hillary news, blogs, and cartoons, all with the mission of \"Rescuing America from the radical ideas of Hillary Clinton\"\u2014to \"the Swifties,\" the nonprofit advocacy group the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which mortally wounded the campaign of John Kerry in 2004. He then proudly refers to the Stop Her Now banner, which his group has flown over a number of Clinton's campaign appearances, as a way to attract potential supporters and irritate Hillary. \"I'm sure she said to her aide, 'We need to get a bazooka and take that thing down.' That's the real Hillary that nobody gets to see.\" This wouldn't be recognizable as a punch line in any other room, but supporters laugh approvingly and put down their white wine and orange cheese cubes to clap.\n\n Collins thinks his use of \"humor\" will allow his anti-Hillary venture to succeed where others have failed, and that his cartoons and sight gags will ultimately play a major role in preventing Hillary Clinton from becoming president. \"You do it with satire,\" he explains to his guests. \"Because it is a much more effective way to define somebody.\"\n\n Formidable is not exactly the word that leaps to mind while watching Collins pitch his potential donors. He and his associates don't appear savvy or particularly well organized. And a movement based around cartoons that trot out stale liberal stereotypes hardly seems like the kind of grassroots juggernaut that could upend a front-running presidential candidate. Then again, few people would have guessed in January 2004 that a group of deeply partisan veterans telling a dubious tale about John Kerry's military service would ultimately shape that year's election and enter the American political lexicon. And to Collins and his ilk, the tactics of the Swifties represent not a new low for American politics but a grand strategy that can be employed with even more venom, and to greater effect, with Hillary.\n\n Already there are dozens of Web sites\u2014Stop Hillary PAC, Gotta Stop Hillary, and The Hillary Project to name just a few\u2014devoted to Hillary's demise. No other candidate in history has ever inspired a similar cottage industry of anger\u2014Web sites, books, and movies, not to mention the Hillary Clinton Voodoo Kit (\"Stick It to Her, Before She Sticks It to You!\") or the articles explaining her occult connection (\"Proof Positive That Hillary Clinton is an Illuminist Witch: Expos\u00E9 of Hillary's Christmas Tree\"). At a March conference of conservatives in Washington, D.C., Hillary barf bags were distributed to convention-goers along with 1,000 free copies of The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy's Dossier on Hillary Clinton, written by Amanda B. Carpenter, a 25-year-old woman who told me Hillary was \"the student council president that you can't stand.\"\n\n Here at the Dallas fund-raiser, all the attendees are in agreement with young Amanda.\n\n \"She's way too scary,\" Patty McKinley, a bubbly Texan, tells me between sips of wine.\n\n A few feet away, Bill Solemene, an advertising ecutive active in Republican politics, expresses a similar fear. \"I think everybody is frightened to death of her,\" he says. \"She has a mean streak in her.\"\n\n Scary Frightened to death By now, Clinton's flaws as a candidate are well-known\u2014the problems giving a straight answer, the warmth and authenticity issues\u2014but they're also fairly typical for a politician. Here in Dallas, though, and in the rest of anti-Hillary land, the hostility toward Clinton tends to be expressed in bafflingly vague and emotional terms. Discussions with self-declared enemies of Hillary Clinton, prominent and not, across the country yield a head-spinning barrage of motivations for their ill will, but one thing is immediately clear: Few if any have anything to do with the mandated insurance coverage of Clinton's health care plan (or HillaryCare, in hater parlance), her carefully triangulated position on Iran, or her incremental shift against the war in Iraq.\n\n Instead, they say she is an extremist left-wing flower child masquerading as a moderate, or a warmongering hawk disguised as a liberal. She's a liar and a lesbian (short hair! pantsuits!), a cold fish and an adulteress. She has no maternal instincts and is hobbled by a debilitating case of insecurity, for which she compensates by acting like a thug. She is the spineless wife of a habitual cheat, and the willful enabler of her husband's affairs. She's in politics to keep Bill around, and she ran for the Senate, and then the presidency, to exact revenge for his philandering. She has no God, or her devoutness is frighteningly fundamentalist. She's a condescending elitist who sees people\u2014even her friends\u2014as steps on a stairway to the presidency. She is a partisan, a panderer, the personification of everything that is wrong with America.\n\n She is, to them, an empty vessel into which they can pour everything they detest about politicians, ambitious women, and an American culture they fear is being wrested from their control.\n\n\n\n\"Some of it is related to the truth that, as Hillary says, she and Bill Clinton have defeated what she calls the right-wing machine,\" says Carl Bernstein, author of A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Bernstein, an astute Hillary observer, says that the Clintons rudely stirred Republicans from their dream of perpetually occupying the White House, which seemed plausible after the Reagan revolution. Many hold her responsible, first, for beating them with her role in Bill Clinton's War Room, and then for supporting her wounded husband during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.\n\n Sally Bedell Smith, the author of For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White __House Years, suggests much of the seemingly inexplicable rage against the Clintons can be traced back to what she says is \"the nature of Bill's womanizing over the years.\"\n\n \"Tolerating his weakness has always been part of their marriage,\" says Bedell Smith. \"In their case, it is an unconventional marriage, and they portray it as a traditional marriage. And that is hypocrisy.\"\n\n The notion that Hillary has traded personal, and sexual, humiliation for political gain, all the while claiming a strong feminist streak, is too offensive for many of her most virulent detractors to stomach.\n\n R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is a veteran hater who plumbed the sordid sexual details of the Clinton scandals in The American Spectator. His archconservative magazine spearheaded the investigation into \"Troopergate,\" eventually leading to the Paula Jones case, the Lewinsky scandal, and Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings. As Tyrrell sees it, the Clintons are \"a generational phenomenon\" in that Hillary's candidacy serves as a referendum on the social upheaval of the 1960s. Those who agreed with the era's changes, many of which she embodies, would vote for her. Those who thought the changes were disastrous see her as an agent of social ruin.\n\n Dick Morris, the political strategist and former confidant of the Clintons, has a different explanation. First off, he wants me to understand he doesn't like the term \"haters\" to describe the people who hate Hillary, saying that it delegitimizes their complaints. A critic with the rare distinction of having formed his animosity up close\u2014\"I know her. Everybody else is just working off the record,\" he told me\u2014Morris says that the hostility toward Hillary has its roots in her personality. He says Republicans and Democrats alike pick up on her \"dishonesty\" and \"religiously based certitude\" that she is ultimately correct in everything she does. \"There is this sort of theological belief in one's own rectitude and everybody's lack of it that animates Hillary,\" he says.\n\n Dan Kuenster, the cartoonist of Stop Her Now, agrees. \"She's got this bitchy quality,\" he tells me. \"Like she's higher-than-thou.\"\n\n The conservative pundit Bay Buchanan also takes offense at what she calls Hillary's \"superiority and arrogance.\" In her office in the Virginia campaign headquarters of Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, Buchanan posits that Hillary's perceived haughtiness has roots in a deep-seated insecurity that \"is the driving force in this woman's life.\"\n\n Buchanan's evidence for that insecurity Clinton's myriad hairstyles over the years. Buchanan literally illustrates this theory in her 2007 book, The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton, with a page of photographs documenting the evolution of Clinton's coiffure. (The captions to the different snapshots of Hillary's hairdos read \"a) 'I'm serious.' b) 'I'm nice.' c) 'I'm Lady Di.' d) 'I'm smart.' e) 'I'm French.' \")\n\n\n\nDick Collins has invested more than $300,000 of his own money into Stop Her Now. He's also hired what he says is a top-notch staff that he thinks will make the site really damaging, especially once it reaches the $4 million fund-raising target he has set.\n\n The heart and soul of Stop Her Now appears to be the cartoons of Kuenster, who spreads his drawings on a small table in the corner of the Dallas restaurant. Plump and sloppy in dress, Kuenster has done animation for the films An American Tail and All Dogs Go to Heaven, but now he's focusing on sketches of Clinton's brutalized rivals\u2014Barack Obama with a cigarette jammed into his ear and John Edwards with his $400 hair frazzled and teeth knocked out.\n\n He pushes his wire-framed glasses closer to his face and pulls out a drawing of Hillary relaxing in her trophy room, where Gennifer Flowers's head is mounted on the wall like a prize deer. To narrate the picture, Kuenster imitates Hillary by deepening his voice to a Kathleen Turner\u2013esque smoothness that is meant to be menacing. \"That lying bitch deserved to be taken down,\" he says, sounding nothing like Hillary Clinton.\n\n The next morning, Collins introduces me to the site's \"red meat\" blogger, Mark Harvey, a former army contractor who claims to possess a unique gift for interpreting body language. Dressed in a black suit and tan ostrich cowboy boots, he taps the wooden table with his fingernails while speaking with contempt about the \"pandering czarina.\" He says he detects in her physical movements \"a lot to hide. It's the eyes. I dwell on the eyes. She's very condescending. And has this look of 'Oh, you poor person, I've got you so hoodwinked.' \" (At the beginning of October, Collins severed his official relationship with Harvey, though Stop Her Now occasionally still links to Harvey's Take Our Country Back blog. \"We wanted a more philosophical view of Hillary and her policies,\" Collins explains to me months later. \"His was a harsher line that we prefer to link to.\")\n\n For his part, Collins does not project nearly as much open hostility as his staff. Affable, good-natured, and a firm believer in the afternoon nap, he prominently displays on his office walls photos of former Republican presidents and current GOP presidential candidates shaking his hand. (A veteran Republican fund-raiser who served as Texas finance cochair for Bob Dole's presidential campaign, Collins has given money to Rudy Giuliani and John McCain but says he's not endorsing before the primary.) Collins leans back in his chair behind a large wooden desk cluttered with papers, his laptop, an antique pistol, and a collection of campaign buttons. (i shot j.r. reads one, depicting Ronald Reagan with gun drawn. i despise bleeding heart liberals.) He professes ignorance about what it is that gets Hillary's opponents so riled up. At least part of Collins's own motivation appears to be in the long and largely failure-ridden tradition of seeking personal gain at Hillary's expense.\n\n \"To the extent that we're successful, it raises my profile,\" says Collins, who acknowledges harboring ambitions to one day serve as governor of Texas or as a U.S. senator. \"There are some benefits, I guess.\"\n\n But there appears to be something else at play, too. A picture of his mother, the first woman elected to the Dallas city council, hangs on the wall across the room.\n\n \"They wanted an attractive younger woman,\" Collins says to explain his mother's political ascent. \"She was a team player; she was a traditional southern woman.\"\n\n Collins is surrounded by strong, accomplished women. His mother was a trailblazing politician, one of his daughters is a newscaster, the other is a college athlete. The ebullient accountant with whom he shares office space is a crack shot with a rifle and audits all his businesses and charities.\n\n But the unabashed ambition of Hillary Clinton is unseemly to Collins, who sees her candidacy as a triumphant feminism piling on after winning the 1960s culture wars.\n\n \"In a sense, the feminists have already won,\" he says, swiveling in his chair. \"There is equal pay for equal work. But the feminists take it to the next level, the bra burning and 'We don't need men except for breeding purposes.' All this kind of extreme stuff.\"\n\n He says Lady Bird Johnson was a much better model for a president's wife and traces all the animosity people feel for Hillary to her violating the country's traditional conception of a first lady.\n\n \"She became the first partisan first lady,\" Collins says. \"Then she became a feminist first lady.\"\n\n Either Collins's seventh-floor office is stuck in a time warp (bra burning Lady Bird), or he is still grasping for a pellucid reason to justify what he does. With him and other Clinton foes, there is always the sense that there is something else below the surface he would prefer not to discuss or doesn't really comprehend.\n\n\n\nThe good news for Hillary is that she's heard it all before, as the charges against her really haven't changed in fifteen years. But that hasn't stopped her enemies from rehashing old material through new mediums.\n\n Because Internet videos and digital films are cheaper and easier to produce than television commercials, there will be more and more films like Hillary: The Movie, a feature-length documentary that \"aims to expose the truth about her conflicts in the past and her liberal plot for the future.\" The film is the brainchild of David Bossie, a former Whitewater investigator who in 1998, while working on another case, was forced to resign for trying to incriminate Hillary for fraud by selectively editing the transcripts of Webster Hubbell, Bill Clinton's first associate attorney general.\n\n Bossie is now the president of the conservative group Citizens United, which is located in a four-story row house on Capitol Hill. On the first floor, editing bays have culled hundreds of hours of film, even as his crew continues to scour the country for more footage.\n\n \"Half my freaking staff is out all over the freaking place trying to do stuff,\" says Bossie. In his top-floor office, a bust of Ronald Reagan stands near a mailing sent out by his group's political-action committee: dare to be bold. help stop hillary before she becomes president.\n\n Bossie says his film will span decades of Hillary's life. \"She has a long record, and we will cover a multitude of topics,\" he says, boasting that people \"very familiar personally with the Clintons\" will offer testimonials. He also says the film, which will be released in early 2008, will feature interviews with Dick Morris, Newt Gingrich, and Jeff Gerth, who followed Whitewater for The New York Times and coauthored the book Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton. (The book reported on a secret pact between the Clintons that assured each of them a turn in the White House.)\n\n Bossie is confident there's still an inexhaustibly fertile market of Clinton hostility, but where that rage comes from, he says, is none of his concern. \"That's an emotional question,\" he says. \"I don't get involved in the emotional aspects of politics.\"\n\n And yet the more he talks about his opposition to Hillary, the more you realize that he believes the good guys have been wronged and that she has gotten away with something. It is an aggravation that pervades the anti-Clinton universe and that imbues it with self-righteousness and an almost crusading sense of mission that shows no signs of abating.\n\n \"Clearly, there are no more investigations,\" says Bossie. \"So the only way she can be held accountable is by the voters.\"\n\n\n\nDespite the inconclusiveness of exhaustive legal and journalistic investigations, Whitewater, Travelgate, and the Wellesley College years are still subjects of feverish speculation for some Hillary haters. But those engaged in the frustrating search for fresh material believe they have stumbled upon an unlikely font in Peter Paul.\n\n \"He's one to keep an eye on,\" Buchanan told me as I walked out of her Virginia office.\n\n Paul, a former Hollywood manager who discovered the romance-novel pinup Fabio, turned his hours of private Hillary footage into a documentary called Hillary! Uncensored. (Paul claims he has received financial help on the project from a murky Clinton-phobic group called the Equal Justice in America Foundation, the spokesman of which would communicate only via e-mail and accused \"Clinton operatives\" of intimidation and \"hacking into our offshore ISP by mysterious forces.\") A preview of the film, posted as a Web clip, is promoted on a Web site operated by Robert Hahn and Scott Swett, two technical producers who developed the site for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The preview has received more than 3 million views on YouTube and Google Video and features a \"constitutional law specialist\" sitting in front of a cheap backdrop of the Supreme Court. At one point, he tells the camera, \"What we're looking at here is the largest election-law fraud in the history of the United States.\"\n\n One afternoon in June, Paul answers the door of his North Carolina home dressed in jeans, brown loafers, and a blue sport shirt stretched across his round stomach. As his wife, a tall blond dressed in sweatpants and a pink shirt that says nothing to wear cleans the kitchen, Paul draws two seats up to a computer in his small study, under a painting of a Christian martyr and beside a copy of a book called Hillary's Secret War. Behind the seats, four orange plastic crates labeled paul v. hillary hold hundreds of legal files related to his ongoing civil suit.\n\n In a nutshell, Paul's case is that after secret talks with Democratic Party officials, he agreed to throw Bill Clinton a Hollywood gala that would double as a fund-raiser for Hillary's 2000 Senate campaign. In exchange, the president, upon leaving office, would join the animation company Paul had formed with Spider-Man creator Stan Lee.\n\n Paul says he spent $1.9 million organizing the event, which featured performances by Cher, Michael Bolton, and Melissa Etheridge. Clinton's Senate campaign filed the cost of the event with the Federal Election Commission at around $500,000, which Paul alleges is a gross underreporting that amounts to federal election fraud.\n\n Further still, he claims that Clinton illegally coordinated the fund-raiser with him and had knowledge of all the money he was laying out for her. He says his smoking gun is a conference call he videotaped in which Clinton can be heard telling him and Lee, \"I'm just thrilled\" and \"You just let me know if there is anything I need to do\" about the gala.\n\n A California appellate court dismissed Clinton from the suit in October and ruled against permitting the call as new evidence. The Clinton campaign strongly denies his accusations.\n\n \"Peter Paul is a professional liar who has four separate criminal convictions, two for fraud,\" the Clinton campaign said in a statement. \"His video repackages a series of seven-year-old false claims about Senator Clinton that have already been rejected by the California state courts, the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission, and the Senate Ethics Committee.\"\n\n Paul's case is flimsy at best, completely indecipherable at worst, but the Clinton antagonists want a piece of him anyway. Never mind that the former Clinton donor has a history of felony convictions (including a cocaine charge and trying to defraud the Cuban government), that his politics lean liberal, and that his allegations border on paranoid. It is sufficient that he provides the promise of new dirt on Hillary.\n\n With clicks of the mouse, he opens videos and spins a web of conspiracies. In 2000, Paul, a brash and bearded dealmaker with a gravelly radio voice, started attending Clinton fund-raisers. Remarkably, he started filming them, too.\n\n One clip he shows me has him hosting a fund-raiser for Hillary on June 9, 2000, at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant Spago in Los Angeles. Hillary talks to him about everything from how the buying of Hillary domain names amounted to an invasion of her privacy to how a date she had at Dartmouth got drunk and surfed down a snow-covered hill.\n\n \"Look at those eyes,\" says Paul as he watches the video. \"The strangest expression in her eyes.\" (Analysis of Clinton's eyes is a favorite motif among her most rabid adversaries, who, despite paying little attention to her policies and positions, believe they have a profound reading of her soul.)\n\n Paul also accuses Hillary of making eyes at his wife, using cocaine, and being a phony worse than \"Nixon in drag.\"\n\n After Hillary personally thanked him from the stage at the August 12, 2000, Hollywood gala, The Washington Post revealed Paul's felony convictions. The Clintons promptly distanced themselves. He blames Bill Clinton for welshing on the comics deal and causing the failure of his business. He also apparently blames the Clintons for forcing him to commit the stock fraud for which he is currently awaiting sentencing under house arrest. Hillary, he argues, plotted his whole downfall from behind the scenes.\n\n \"She did this to me, to my family. I'm responsible for getting her elected,\" says Paul, his beard gone gray and his ankle fitted with an electronic bracelet. \"How did she repay me She destroyed me.\"\n\n\n\nThe search for a unifying theory of what drives Hillary's most fanatical opponents is a futile one. And the haters' accusations, in the end, say more about themselves than the object of their ire.\n\n \"It is often as much about the beholder as Hillary,\" says Bernstein. \"Some of this stuff goes deep into some angry people's psyche. It sets off the crazy button.\"\n\n The Clinton campaign is dismissive of the phenomenon. \"Who knows what motivates these people\" says Jay Carson, a spokesman for the campaign. \"But they should probably get out more, because if they did, they might realize that people are tired of the divisiveness and destruction in which they engage, and Senator Clinton is winning and they are losing.\"\n\n But the \"bitchy quality\" and \"look at those eyes\" type of discourse will likely not stay on the fringes for long. With seemingly rudderless candidates crowding the Republican field, Hillary Clinton is already becoming the party's one galvanizing issue. In the Republican primary, she has hovered like a specter over every debate, with candidates intoning her name like an incantation to wake the slumbering Republican base. (Republican candidates and debate moderators uttered her name forty-three times over the course of the October 21 contest in Orlando.)\n\n Without a consensus-building Republican candidate to energize the party in 2008, the down-with-Hillary battle cry appears to be the best they have. The frothing and stomping of the haters tills the GOP landscape for mainstream institutions like the Republican National Committee, which has already sent out scores of e-mails to reporters skewering Hillary with hater-lite headings like \"Hillary Hypocrisy\" and \"4 More Years of Clinton\" which asserts, \"The Clintons haven't changed one bit since the 1990s.\"\n\n But perhaps the oddest aspect of the whole hater phenomenon is that for all the voodoo dolls and barf bags, Hillary Hammers, and unrestrained spewing of anti-Hillary vitriol, many of the most active practitioners in the movement refuse to count themselves among the ranks of the haters. On the one hand, the last thing they want is to give the Clinton campaign an excuse to dismiss them as an army of lunatics lurking in the margins (even though many of them happen to be lunatics lurking in the margins). But the denial is also tinged with a shame that suggests some awareness of just how confounding and irrational these emotions are.\n\n In his office in Dallas, Collins sits in front of a raindrop-beaded picture window that looks north onto the flat expanses of Texas and, beyond that, to an America he believes and hopes swells with anti-Hillary malice.\n\n \"In the end,\" he says, \"we'll have a pretty substantial nationwide network of Hillary haters.\"\n\n He stops himself.\n\n \"I shouldn't say haters.\"\n\njason horowitz is a writer living in New York. This is his first piece for gq."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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