The Stop Hillary web sites

Houston Chronicle:

When Hillary Clinton complains about the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, she's talking about people like Texas businessman Richard H. Collins.

Collins, a community newspaper publisher and online education entrepreneur from Dallas, has raised millions of dollars over the past three decades for Republicans such as conservative icon Jesse Helms to establishment favorite Kay Bailey Hutchison.

The charismatic heir to a family real estate and insurance fortune is a longtime donor to the Media Research Center, a Virginia-based group that documents what it sees as liberal bias in the news media. He counts GOP uberstrategist Karl Rove among his friends.

"The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is alive and well and flourishing in Red State America," boasts Collins, "and I'm glad to be a part of it."

Such Texas-sized bravado may serve Collins well in his latest political venture: a Web site designed to defeat the person that many on the right consider the most dangerous liberal in America, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.

The site, called StopHerNow.com, describes the New York senator as "a confirmed left-wing radical" and "experienced political chameleon" who is attempting "a massive makeover campaign" to appear "mainstream."

That's the kind of blow-torch rhetoric conservative groups have used in recent elections to make Massachusetts rapist Willie Horton a household name and to sully 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's Vietnam War record. But Collins' group is offering more than the same old smash-mouth politics.

At a time when more young people get their political news from satirists such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than from network anchors, Collins is betting that humor will be a potent weapon against the Democratic presidential front-runner.

"While there is a place for negative advertising, we've heard so much of it that we're almost immune to name-calling," Collins said. "But we're always eager to hear a new joke. Humor can be an effective political tool."

In an election that Collins expects to be tough and close, he's hoping to turn the tide against Hillary Clinton one joke at a time. There are limits, though.

"No profanity," he said. "Chelsea is off-limits. No gay-bashing. And Bill's womanizing is OK, but we don't name names unless they're public knowledge."

Collins, a fourth-generation Texas political activist, is the great-grandson of a state senator, the nephew of a congressman, and the son of the first woman ever elected to the Dallas City Council. To launch his project, he's anted up $400,000 in seed money, but he hopes to raise up to $4 million in outside donations.

The Dallas businessman has company on the anti-Hillary bandwagon.

Citizens United, run by the creator of the 1988 "Willie Horton" ads against Democrat Michael Dukakis, is preparing a documentary on Clinton. The Hillary Clinton Accountability Project has taken the Clintons to court on behalf of an estranged Clinton fundraiser. On the Web, AgainstHillary.com spews anti-Clinton vitriol, and more than 563,000 people have joined Facebook's "Stop Hillary Clinton" group.

Amid hundreds of incoming verbal missiles from critics on the right and left, the Clinton campaign has launched its own "Fact Hub," to present her side of the story.

Democratic activists are convinced that the anti-Hillary zealots will create more sympathy than antipathy for the target of their venom.

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Sympathy may have contributed to Hillary's first election to the Senate, but I don't think it can get her elected President. Nor do I think that the anti Hillary web sites will stop her either. She will be defeated on the issues and her response to them. If StopHillaryNow has some good jokes that effectively ridicule her positions on the issues it may have an effect. Her attempts to have it every which way without taking a stand provides a deep and wide vein to mine. It will be those issues that undermine her candidacy much more than any scandals that she and media will just ignore.