Campaign 1998 was the dirtiest in recent memory. The bottom of the slime-pit was reached by Al D’Amato and Chuck Schumer, who got into a spitting contest to determine which was the sleaziest politician in the history of the U.S. Senate: Schumer won. Elsewhere, leftist Democrats pulled out all the stops, blaring the message: A GOP victory means more churches burned. In Illinois, the Senate race between Carol Moseley-Braun and Peter Fitzgerald was no exception. In the closing days of the campaign, Senator Moseley-Brann repeatedly denounced Fitzgerald for political extremism and for his relationship with an “avowed white racial supremacist.”

The evidence? Fitzgerald supposedly attended an extremist political rally in Rockford that had been arranged by the president of The Rockford Institute who, so the story ran, was affiliated with a racist neo-Confederate organization called The League of the South. Every detail in this indictment is false, beginning with the fact that it was our executive vice president, Chris Check, who organized both Rallies for Rockford and not the infamous “racial supremacist” denounced by Carol. Even though reporters from Channel 7 in Chicago and the Chicago Tribune, after interviewing me, concluded that there was no story, they did not hesitate to “print the legend,” especially when master race-baiter Jesse Jackson and family-values advocate Hillary Rodham Clinton came to town to repeat the charges.

I was not surprised when the Tribune did not publish my response. The Tribune has had an ax to grind against Chronicles ever since we exposed the paper’s extreme liberalism: The then-editor and later board chairman was angry enough to write me to complain personally. Since no one else in the Chicago media appears to take much interest in questions of fact, I have to waste space in Chronicles on this trivial issue, if only to go on record.

First, my relations with the Republican candidate, Peter Fitzgerald. I have never supported Mr. Fitzgerald and did not vote for him. I met him on one occasion only, when he came to my office seeking my support. We disagreed on virtually everything, and I told him candidly that it was free-trade and openborders globalists like him who were alienating the blue-collar workers and Reagan Democrats that represented the real future of his party.

Moseley-Braun misrepresented the facts in saying that I was in any way associated with Fitzgerald. But Fitzgerald, when asked about the charges, knowingly lied in denying that he had ever met me. Even a glad-handing politician would remember the hour and a half he spent in someone’s office in the presence of several witnesses. The campaign worker who brought him to see me certainly remembers and has said so on the record.

Second, there is the Rally for Rockford. It was a public forum to discuss judicial taxation, not a protest against desegregation. A senatorial candidate could hardly be faulted for going to an open forum attended by nearly 700 public-spirited voters. The only trouble is that Fitzgerald, after promising to come, turned out to be the little man who wasn’t there, but this did not stop the abuse. One of Fitzgerald’s campaign workers (who later got shafted by the candidate) handed out literature outside the lecture hall.

As Carol’s numbers rose, Fitzgerald gave into pressure to “renounce” (read: “denounce”) the president of The Rockford Institute, and he declared that he would never have had anything to do with me if he had known of my connections with The League of the South. Of course, his campaign staff did know well before the rally—because my association with the League was publicized in the Rockford paper. This knowledge did not prevent one of his staffers from showing up at my office, with another candidate in tow, a good seven months after the local Gannett paper devoted two front-page stories to the League (and less than a month before Fitzgerald’s renunciation). Some of our friends are very angry with Fitzgerald, but what did they expect of politicians? Although Moseley-Braun was regarded as doomed from the beginning, the amazing thing is that Fitzgerald’s cowardice and ineptitude very nearly snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Third, there is The League of the South, an organization of Southern writers and scholars that should be well known to our readers. The League has received favorable treatment from the London Times and the BBC, and it was praised by columnist George Will—oh, but then, Moseley-Brown called Will a racist, too. The League was the sum-total of the evidence offered by Carol, Jesse, and Hillary.

I didn’t expect fair treatment from a leftist politician in a desperate bid to save her sinking career, and I was naive enough to hope that a self-described conservative would check a few facts before denouncing me. But if Moseley-Braun imitated Johnny Cochran in playing the “race card,” Peter Fitzgerald took Bill Clinton as his model, first denying he knew me, then claiming he had forgotten, but never thinking twice about damaging the reputation of an innocent man. When he goes to Washington, to join what Mark Twain called “the best Congress money can buy,” Fitzgerald will fit right in.