Former Republican Strategist 'Vows' to Make Hillary Clinton President

David Brock speaks at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, Ark. in March. Photo by AP/Danny Johnston

Licking their wounds after the midterm elections, U.S. Democrats are turning to a former Republican media hit man to improve their chances of holding on to the White House in 2016.

That hit man’s name is David Brock. He sports a silver pompadour and Trotsky-style wire-rimmed glasses, The Guardian reports. His plan is to beat Republicans through a combination of “quick-response law, ethics groups and journalism groups, a strategy pioneered, naturally, by the Republicans.”

The paper continues:

“I know from experience that, over a 30-year arc, rightwing conservatives came to dominate American political discourse in the media, and it needs to be countered,” Brock told the Observer last week. “And I know how something like it would work on the progressive side.”

In the culture wars of the mid-90s, Brock, 52, was a far-right hero. He wrote a book casting doubt on the credibility of Anita Hill, the aide who accused supreme court justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Then, as part of the conservative-funded Arkansas Project, Brock broke the story of “Troopergate” and identified a woman named Paula, aka Paula Jones, one of a string of Bill Clinton “bimbo eruptions” that would culminate in the Monica Lewinsky-inspired impeachment hearings.

Once so committed that his answering machine message said: “Hello, I’m out trying to bring down the president,” Brock has turned on his deep-pocketed former sponsors with a vengeance. First came his sympathetic biography of Hillary Clinton in 1996, followed a year later by an Esquire magazine essay, Confessions of a Right-Wing Hitman, that announced his break with the right. Brock recalled last week how in the mid-90s he began to have “huge reservations about the character and integrity of the people in the conservative movement”.