COLUMN ONE : Clinton’s Visceral Opposition : The President has become the target of bitter accusations unprecedented in tone and intensity. Some say the vitriol is being fueled by a new attack culture.

It doesn’t take much to oppose a President’s budget or denounce his health care plan or fulminate against members of his Cabinet. But you really have to hate a guy to picket his mother’s funeral.

Meet Fred Phelps.

“I guess I got his attention,” says Phelps, a Baptist minister, disbarred attorney and sometime political candidate, recalling how he and members of his congregation drove the 439 miles from Wichita, Kan., to Hot Springs, Ark., in January to denounce Clinton outside the church where his mother was eulogized.

Phelps’ words are as rough-edged as his tactics. “People don’t trust that sleazy hypocrite, babbling the Bible out one side of his mouth while pushing his baby-killing, fag-promoting agenda on the world,” he says when asked why he dislikes Clinton so.

It would be a mistake to call Phelps typical. Even among those who share his intense dislike for the President, most would stop short of disturbing the dead. But in his flamboyance, Phelps vividly exemplifies a phenomenon abroad in the land--the Clinton haters.

Linda Wotring is one. A soft-spoken 54-year-old widow who runs a small business outside Toledo, Ohio, and listens regularly to broadcasts of the Rev. Pat Robertson, she worries that Clinton is heading the nation toward “a socialist government.” She has heard, and is inclined to believe, tales circulated by conservative activists that link Clinton to drug running, multiple murders and financial corruption. And she shares with many other conservatives a deep distaste for the two H’s of Clinton Hatred--Hillary and homosexuals.

“I disapprove of women in high positions like that. She has no business doing what she’s doing,” Wotring says.

As for gays, well, “this is a free country,” she says. “Gays have rights, but we have rights too. Gays are going to have AIDS, that’s almost a known fact. They want to be in the military so that when they get AIDS the government can take care of them.”

At least a quarter of the population tells pollsters they “strongly disapprove” of Clinton--a measure of presidential opposition almost unheard of during a period of peace and moderate prosperity. Within that group, pollsters estimate that perhaps half--about 30 million Americans--nurture a dislike of Clinton that burns with the pure flame of hatred.

The presence of such a large and visceral opposition has damaged Clinton--distracting him, as he showed on June 24 with an outburst during a radio interview aboard Air Force One in which he denounced attacks by the Rev. Jerry Falwell and talk-show host Rush Limbaugh; stiffening his Republican opponents in Congress against compromise, and keeping his aides and the media occupied with a steady rain of charges.

“All of the attacks eat up information time,” says Clinton strategist Mandy Grunwald. “He says ‘health care’ and the opposition says ‘Whitewater.’ He says ‘crime’ and they say ‘Paula Jones.’ ”

The result is “an environment that has been really hard to communicate in.”

Clinton’s background--from his avoidance of the draft to his alleged marital infidelities--make him an inviting target. But both conservative and liberal analysts agree that the intensity, tenor and extent of the attacks on him are part of a broader trend.

“We’ve entered an era in which people are more shrill, more negative. Clinton is just an example of that,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “There is, today, a new-found institutionalization of hate--of anti-politician hatred.

“People say things now that 15 years ago, you would never say,” Mellman adds. “We’ve loosened the bounds.”

New Attack Culture

Some political analysts believe the vitriol of the attacks will backfire, and already some prominent conservatives have begun distancing themselves from Clinton’s most fervent opponents. “I think this is beyond the pale,” said former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, an often-mentioned Republican presidential hopeful. “When you start getting into bizarre stuff that I think lacks any substantiation whatsoever, you discredit responsible criticism.”

That this President has become the object and test case for the power of the new attack culture is a matter of considerable irony, for Bill Clinton--a politician who considers compromise not a necessary evil, but a positive good--came into office saying that he had a special mission to knit the nation back together after a decade and more of ideological strife. Just get past the “false choices” of ideological extremes and political leaders could forge a new consensus of the center, Clinton and many of his advisers believed.

Instead, notes Republican pollster William McInturff, 17 months into his term, Clinton has become a polarizing figure approaching the scale of Ronald Reagan in the depths of the 1982 recession or Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam.

Even by that measure, the attacks on Clinton are different.

“Ronald Reagan had some very hostile, very articulate, very combative detractors,” notes Reagan’s former pollster, Richard Wirthlin. But “most of Reagan’s opposition was political,” while Clinton’s is “cultural, not political” in the traditional sense. That “cultural disconnect has added another gallon of gasoline to the fires.”

The cultural anxieties center on the issue that Clinton has made his mantra--change. For those--including many white Americans--who feel their dominant status in society slipping, who see the values they have long cherished challenged by newcomers espousing different views, and who worry about the future that awaits them and their children, Clinton’s espousal of still more change has come to symbolize all the threats to their way of life. That focus helps explain why Mrs. Clinton and the Administration’s support for the civil rights of gays and lesbians have both become lightning rods.

“I don’t like all this,” said Raymond Reiland, 72, of Iowa City, Iowa, in a comment typical of many Clinton detractors. “I’m an older guy, we’ve seen an awful lot of changes recently. We kind of thought the way we looked at life was a better way of doing things.”

Clinton’s personal conduct deepens that anxiety. His detractors see Clinton’s stands on issues such as abortion or civil rights for gays combining with aspects of his personal life--from his alleged infidelities to his wife’s non-traditional role--into a unified attack on traditional values.

His most ardent opponents go beyond that, seeing Clinton as not just a President whom they dislike, but one whom they regard as illegitimate--one who achieved his high office by hoodwinking the country into viewing him as a moderate, rather than a liberal, and who has disgraced the country by his personal conduct. The idea of illegitimacy was clearly expressed by a hero of the right, Oliver L. North, in his speech accepting the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Virginia.

“We send the Clintons and their cronies a simple but unmistakable message,” North declared. “This is our government. You stole it, and we are going to take it back.”

Barriers Lowered

Moreover, several factors have lowered the barriers that, in earlier days, protected a President from attacks:

The end of the Cold War has changed the stature of the President--moving him off the imperial heights of the “most powerful man in the world” to the mundane level of a political leader struggling over incremental domestic policy questions.

And Clinton’s own willingness to engage fully in the world of popular culture--appearing on Arsenio Hall’s TV show during the campaign and on MTV forums during his presidency--has leveled the distance from ordinary voters that insulated past presidents.

“Moving from Fleetwood Mac to ‘Ruffles and Flourishes’ is very tough,” says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, referring to the rock band that performed Clinton’s campaign theme song and the presidential fanfare. “Voters are in a very conflicted mood about it.”

But overlaying all that, “conservatives do seem to have channels of communicating with their own,” says Wirthlin. “Rush Limbaugh, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson--that adds an intensity. There’s simply a more vitriolic tone that I didn’t see evident (from the opposition) during the Reagan years.”

Reckless Accusations

Indeed, Clinton’s most visceral opponents have unleashed a barrage both breathtakingly intense and astonishingly reckless.

In a recent letter sent to media organizations, for example, former Rep. William Dannemeyer, the conservative Orange County Republican who left Congress in 1992 to run for the U.S. Senate, demanded a congressional hearing into what he termed a “frightening” series of deaths “under other than natural circumstances” of people with a connection to Clinton.

“Since President Clinton had a direct or indirect contact with these people who have died, it raises the very serious question of whether he is involved, directly or indirectly, in their deaths,” Dannemeyer wrote.

In another example, Falwell ran a promotion in May on his “Old Time Gospel Hour” for a videotape on which longtime opponents accuse Clinton, in lurid fashion, of having a hand in multiple murders. The attackers also suggest that Vincent Foster, the deputy White House counsel whose death last summer was ruled a suicide, actually was assassinated to cover up a massive stock manipulation swindle engineered by Mrs. Clinton and officers of the wealthy, Arkansas-based Stevens family.

Mark DeMoss, a spokesman for Falwell, says the conservative minister, who sold “tens of thousands” of the videotapes at $43 per copy, does not know whether the accusations are true or false. “He thinks they should be investigated,” DeMoss said in a recent interview. Proceeds from tape sales paid for almost all of Falwell’s air time on about 200 TV stations nationwide, DeMoss added.

The sale of the videotapes, along with fund-raising drives by Clinton attackers such as conservative activist Floyd Brown, represent one aspect of the new attack culture--the rise of what might be called “scandal entrepreneurs.”

A generation ago, direct-mail fund-raisers discovered how well the specter of powerful enemies could generate money for political candidates. A second generation of the direct-mail industry learned to use the technique to raise money not primarily for a candidate, but for the fund-raisers themselves. The scandal entrepreneurs represent a third generation who first create an issue and then milk it as a source of funds.

For example, the company that produced Falwell’s videotape, Citizens for Honest Government, based in Winchester, Calif., recently produced a sequel that repeats the earlier allegations and adds the charge that as governor of Arkansas, Clinton took part in an effort to use the Arkansas Development Finance Agency to launder millions of dollars in profits from drug running. So far, 20,000 copies of the sequel have been sold, along with more than 100,000 of the original, company officials say.

The accusers offer no evidence for any of their allegations.

The Arkansas finance agency, known as ADFA, was the subject of extensive investigation by The Times and other news organizations during the 1992 campaign. Reporters found that law firms and bond underwriters with ties to Clinton were enriched by contracts with the agency and that ADFA provided state assistance to many companies whose executives gave contributions to Clinton’s campaigns.

But the investigations uncovered no evidence of money laundering or drug transactions. Indeed, Clinton’s main accuser, Larry Nichols, a disgruntled former mid-level ADFA employee who has fed reporters allegations against Clinton since 1990, only recently began making the drug accusations.

Dannemeyer, for his part, includes in his list of “unnatural” deaths many that only the most determined conspiracy theorist could find suspicious--the demise, for example, of Paul Tully, a brilliant Democratic political strategist who was also an overweight chain smoker and who died of a heart attack in his Little Rock hotel room during the 1992 campaign.

The former congressman also attempts to link Clinton to the deaths of four Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents in the assault on the David Koresh compound in Waco, Tex., last year. Dannemeyer identifies the four men as “Clinton bodyguards”--a notion first circulated shortly after the Waco disaster by supporters of Koresh, who insisted the men had been shot in the back by fellow agents to prevent them from revealing Clinton’s secrets.

Role of the Media

Like many such stories, this one has a grain of truth at its base. Every four years, the Secret Service, an arm of the Treasury Department, recruits agents from other parts of Treasury, particularly ATF, to help with protecting candidates. The four men did assist at some Clinton appearances, but did not have close contact with him, according to ATF officials. Evidence at the trial of surviving followers of Koresh did not indicate that any federal agents were shot in the back.

Nonetheless, such accusations have become staples of radio programs, television broadcasts, magazines and newsletters of the political right. And prominent Clinton attackers are now regular features at conservative gatherings.

Paula Corbin Jones, for example, first aired her accusations of sexual harassment against Clinton at a Washington news conference sponsored by the American Conservative Union. She subsequently repeated her charges on Robertson’s “700 Club” television program.

And in April, the two Arkansas state troopers whose accusations of sexual misconduct by Clinton formed the basis for articles in The Times and the American Spectator magazine were the featured breakfast guests at the annual convention of the California Republican Assembly, the state’s largest grass-roots conservative group. The delegates passed breadbaskets from their tables around the hall to collect donations for the troopers while leaders of the assembly gathered on the stage at the front of the room, placed their hands on the troopers’ heads and prayed.

In today’s culture, accusations quickly spread beyond committed activists, particularly because of the now-ubiquitous medium of talk radio, with its insatiable demand for entertainingly bizarre tales. And they keep alive the sort of political passions that usually calm after an election year. “The constant barrage of negatives has kept the electorate more polarized,” says Democratic pollster Lake. “It’s like red meat.”

Pervasive Allegations

Nichols, for example, conducted about 150 radio interviews during March, April and May--more than one a day--according to Jan Carroll, a publicist at Citizens for Honest Government.

Some indirect evidence of the reach of the anti-Clinton allegations can be gleaned from opinion polls and interviews.

In May, when the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press asked in a poll whether Americans recognized the name Vincent Foster, only 22% did so correctly. But among the 15% of the population who reported that they regularly listen to talk radio, 49% knew who he was.

Several voters interviewed for this story also volunteered that they had heard the accusations.

Jim Pierce, a 46-year-old private investigator from Pittsburgh said he had “heard a lot” of dramatic allegations against Clinton on the talk shows he listens to on his car radio. And he added a comment that would be music to the ears of propagandists the world around: “When you heard one or two allegations, you can dismiss them. But when you’ve got 40 or 50, you start thinking, well, maybe one or two are true.”

And Wotring said: “I just feel he was involved in all of that.”

After all, she asks, “who would want to pin something on the President of the United States” if it weren’t true?