Just past sundown on April 12, Chuck Bartels of the Associated Press had some news he thought might be of interest to the most famous woman in Cabot, Arkansas. So he rang Paula Jones’s doorbell — it plays the spooky five-note theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind — and informed her that Judge Susan Webber Wright had sanctioned the president for contempt of court in the fones v. Clinton litigation. Hearing this, the plaintiff danced a quick, barefoot circle on her front porch, hands held high over her head. “Ah! Ta, ta, ta, ta, ta,” she trilled. Then she stopped: “That’s all I have to say.” Undeterred and no doubt hoping to secure a quote that contained some actual words, Bartels asked whether Jones thought a finding of contempt against the president was “healthy for the country.” To which she replied: “I could care less.” Goodbye.
Here, at last, Paula Jones, upper-middle-class nightmare extraordinaire, has learned to speak the language of well-bred society. For hers is the approved and near-universal response to Judge Wright’s ruling: vague satisfaction mixed with abject boredom.
The president can live with his contempt citation and won’t appeal. The president’s congressional defenders can live with the ruling — Rep. Barney Frank waves it off as “not a surprise” — despite having spent most of a year denying what the judge now says “no reasonable person would seriously dispute.” The Washington Post embraces Wright’s 32-page memorandum as the sensible grownup’s Clinton-scandal Holy Grail, a proportionate response: “Finally, someone has gotten this right.” The New York Times, without evident irony, calls this apparently conclusive courtroom verdict “appropriately symbolic.” To which judgment the paper’s star columnist Maureen Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize for her Jones/Lewinsky pieces fresh in hand, adds a delicate little seasoning of atmospheric gestalt: “This whole farce is so over.” Ah! Ta, ta, ta, ta, ta.
To be sure, Judge Wright’s April 12 essay is not entirely without its pleasures. “Contrary to numerous assertions,” she writes, “this Court did not rule that evidence of the Lewinsky matter was irrelevant or immaterial to the issues in plaintiff’s case.” And, she adds — contrary to numerous other assertions vehemently advanced, throughout the controversy, by the Democratic party — Bill Clinton was unmistakably guilty as charged by the House impeachment managers. There can be “no factual dispute” and there is “simply no escaping the fact” and “the record leaves no doubt” and “the record demonstrates by clear and convincing evidence” . . . that the president defied the orders of a federal judge by responding to questions from Paula Jones’s attorneys with “intentionally false” answers “designed to obstruct the judicial process.” Perjury and obstruction of justice, in other words. Nice of her to say so.
And yet, together with her many big-shot fans, how curiously subdued Judge Wright is about the whole business — as she has been all along. One year ago this month, Wright summarily dismissed Jones’s complaint against the president on the truly incredible reasoning that no rational Arkansas jury would find Clinton’s indecent exposure sufficiently “outrageous” to constitute a tort. Had Clinton told the truth about Monica Lewinsky, the judge now stubbornly insists, she would still have reached the same conclusion. And when, she asks us to believe, did it first occur to Wright that the president might not have told the truth? Not until his televised August 1998 pseudo-confession.
By the evidence of her contempt citation, Susan Webber Wright has learned nothing new since then. She has simply held her tongue. Now she tells us — long after the announcement might have had some meaningful effect on the Senate impeachment trial — that Bill Clinton’s criminal activity is proved beyond question and “not acceptable” in a president.
Well, sort of “not acceptable,” anyway. The matter will be referred to the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct, which exercises disciplinary authority over Clinton’s law license. Nothing much will happen there, of course; former governor Jim Guy Tucker, who was twice convicted of Whitewater felonies by Kenneth Starr and pleaded guilty to a third, still has his law license. It’s the thought that counts, we suppose. Like the thought embodied by the only practical penalty Judge Wright has imposed on the president: a demand that he reimburse her court and Paula Jones’s attorneys for the expenses they incurred as a result of his deceit.
The president violates the law. A major federal investigation ensues. He and his aides lie to and about that investigation for eight months. He marshals the executive branch of government and his political party, the Democratic party, to sustain the lie during a spectacular impeachment proceeding in Congress. And his only punishment is a one-day scolding from a district court judge — plus a couple thousand bucks.
It means something that this result should win such a widespread, sleepy welcome. It means that an influential chunk of America believes a mild rebuke of Clinton appropriate because it expects no better man than he in the Oval Office. The problem is not so much the president’s contempt for Susan Webber Wright. The real problem is our political culture’s cynicism about — genuine contempt for — the presidency itself. This is a problem from which no court can offer us relief.
David Tell, for the Editors
