President Clinton sat for an extended interview with editors and reporters from the Boston Globe last week. The paper described the president as ” uncharacteristically on edge, his face occasionally growing red.” He was being quizzed about the fund-raising scandals now engulfing his party. And he was asked why he hadn’t placed stricter rules on future Democratic money- grubbing.
“Now can you explain to me how that will be setting a moral example if I made the Democrats even more vulnerable than they are now?” Clinton sputtered. Interesting morality, that: What’s bad for the Democratic party, apparently, cannot be moral. But the president was only getting started. He grew “visibly angered.” He asked the Globe to “show me one case where I compromised the public interest for a special interest.” Okay: How about when your White House let a Chinese arms merchant into the Oval Office at the behest of a party donor, Mr. President?
Clinton wasn’t biting. “We know that we did not raise as much foreign money . . . as the other party does,” he said. This is fabulously false. No one has so far accused the Republican party of raising a single dime of illegal money from foreign nationals, as the DNC seems quite clearly to have done on more than one occasion.
Several hours after his Globe interview, Clinton spoke at a fund- raising dinner for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in New York City. He praised the party’s $ 25,000 “soft-money” contributors for joining him despite “knowing you might be targeted for the exercise of your constitutional right to stand up and support” Democrats with cash. Practically in the next breath, Clinton asked the same contributors to help get the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform legislation passed. That bill, our readers know, would gut the constitutional right the president had just finished celebrating.
