By ABC's Barrie Cassidy
Photo: To this point there has been no substantiated allegation of wrongdoing. (AAP: Alan Porritt)
During the Whitewater scandal, Bill Clinton's opponents went flat out to destroy the president and came up empty. As Barrie Cassidy writes, the Coalition better hope the AWU slush fund affair doesn't follow the same path.
There are uncanny similarities between the AWU scandal in Australia and the first major scandal of the Clinton administration, Whitewater - a story that I covered while based in Washington in the early 1990s.
The origins of Whitewater went back 16 years before Bill Clinton was elected.
In the late 1970s, Bill Clinton was Arkansas' attorney-general earning a modest $US35,000 a year, and his partner Hillary was a legal aid at a small Little Rock law firm.
An old friend Jim McDougal and his wife Susan approached the Clintons to invest in building vacation homes along the White River near Little Rock. Soon afterwards, the scheme failed, and to prop it up, McDougal made illegal transfers of money from his own savings and loan association, Madison Guaranty.
Then, a decade and half later, while McDougal was being investigated for that and other matters, the Clinton name turned up on documents. That set off a media and political frenzy, with numerous journalists digging back into the Clintons' past.
Bill Clinton insisted he had done nothing wrong; that he knew of no illegal activity and that when the investment went bust, he and Hillary remained a part of the Whitewater Development Corporation in name only and had no further involvement in any of McDougal's business enterprises.
Clinton said the McDougals were honest in their dealings with him, and that he had nothing to do with the management of the investment, and kept no records or books.
Susan McDougal said only that the Clintons had done nothing wrong. She eventually went to jail for contempt because she refused to give evidence to a grand jury.
The most damaging evidence came from a former Arkansas municipal judge and banker, David Hale, who worked with McDougal on the loan.
Hale, until the 1990s, said nothing about the Clintons. But once he was indicted on unrelated fraud charges, he cut a deal with the prosecutors, accepting a reduced sentence in return for evidence before the grand jury investigating Whitewater.
Hale alleged that Clinton had pressured him into making a loan to the McDougals. Because he had said nothing up until then, his testimony was dismissed by many as lacking in credibility and self-serving.
The story dragged on for many damaging months, but after three separate inquiries, there was nothing to link the Clintons with any of the criminal conduct committed by others.
The Democrats dismissed the episode as a witch hunt, and the Republicans were left frustrated that the scandal caught up so many but missed the biggest fish.
Clinton faced off against his chief political accuser, Senator Bob Dole, in the 1996 presidential election and won with 379 electoral college votes to 159, an improvement of nine electoral college votes on the 1992 election.
In the dying days of the scandal, an owner of one of the former Whitewater vacation homes hung a large sign out for the constant stream of reporters: "Go Home, Idiots."
If the "Go Home, Idiots" moment arrived in the AWU scandal, then it was probably around 4.15pm on Tuesday, when the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Julie Bishop, fronted a doorstop interview in Parliament's Mural Hall; though this time it was the reporters making the judgment that the allegations had gone too far.
Inadvertently or otherwise, Bishop had earlier left an impression with reporters that the Prime Minister had knowingly committed fraud. She had massively raised the stakes, effectively accusing the Prime Minister of corruption.
She had said:
... she (Gillard) and Wilson and Blewitt wanted to hide from the AWU that an unauthorised fund was being set up to siphon funds through it for their benefit and not for the benefit of the AWU.
The quote was put to her time and again at the 4.15pm doorstop and Bishop denied having said it. She eventually insisted her remarks applied to just Wilson and Blewitt, and not to Gillard. But for too long her obstinacy got in the way of clarity.
That, together with the secret meeting with Blewitt, was the moment when Bishop lost control of the prosecution. The fact that Tony Abbott was sitting mute in the Parliament, contracting out such serious allegations against the Prime Minister, wasn't helping the cause either.
The Republican strategy in the prosecution of the Whitewater story was to focus not so much on the end game, but to simply and constantly remind the public that the Clintons once associated with shady characters.
Stupidly, Coalition MPs were backgrounding journalists that that was their strategy in the AWU case as well.
At the end of the Whitewater media saturation, the public did not focus so much on shady characters from the past; they were left confused, certainly, but nevertheless satisfied that Clinton's opponents had gone flat out to destroy the president and came up empty.
That's the risk again for the opposition in this strikingly similar case; the breadth and volume of the media coverage - and the intensity and time committed to it by the Coalition - can only be justified if in the minds of the public there was ever a reasonable chance that the Prime Minister did something wrong.
To this point there has been no substantiated allegation of wrongdoing, and while that remains the case, the issue can only go one of two ways from here: either it will have a neutral outcome, or it will backfire on the Opposition.
