REP. STEVE BUYER OF INDIANA is not a household name, even among Indiana Republicans. But House speaker Newt Gingrich stood aside on February 4 for Buyer to address a closed-door gathering of all 228 House Republicans. Buyer took on Topic A: the pathetic response by congressional Republicans to the White House sex scandal. President Clinton’s denial of a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky and of having urged her to lie under oath, Buyer said, is “a combination of George Bush’s ‘Read my lips’ and Richard Nixon’s ‘I am not a crook.'” And it sets the standard, Buyer said, for judging the president’s truthfulness. This — trust — is what people care about, not legalities or obstruction of justice or impeachment. “We should reinforce his standard,” Buyer insisted, by citing it over and over again and adding that we hope the president is proved to be telling the truth once all the facts are known. “That should be our message,” Buyer declared.
Buyer’s clever suggestion is important for three reasons. One, it gives Republicans something to say that neither abets a White House coverup nor casts Republicans themselves in a bad light. Two, it reduces the scandal to a single test the public understands and Clinton probably can’t meet. Three, it fits with the Watergate-like fashion in which the scandal may be unfolding.
Buyer’s advice is not the only sign Republicans are ready to lift their code of silence in dealing with the scandal. When Senate staffers met on February 5, they were given permission to criticize the White House for stonewalling the release of any facts, stonewalling that continued at Clinton’s press conference the next day. A week earlier, they’d been instructed to zip their lips, if only because Clinton’s popularity in polls had soared after the State of the Union address on January 27.
Republicans desperately need something to say that isn’t crassly partisan. In the first days of the scandal, silence was appropriate. The press was rapidly laying out the evidence against Clinton. Besides, Republicans were terrified of being accused by the White House and the media of exploiting the scandal for political gain.
Soon, however, Republican silence was actually aiding the president. All the public heard was Clinton’s firm denial and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s charge that right-wing conspirators had concocted the case against the president. Monica Lewinsky said nothing publicly, nor did Ken Starr or most Republicans. And when Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri broke ranks on January 31 and zinged Clinton, he failed to prompt other Republicans to join in. So the Clinton line was unopposed, and Republicans were enablers in the coverup.
Troubled by this, Buyer asked constituents in Indiana for their take on the scandal. All they wanted to know, he told me, was whether Clinton is telling the truth about himself and Monica Lewinsky. If it turns out he lied in claiming there was no sexual relationship, “the American people will not look kindly on that,” Buyer said. What makes Buyer’s strategy of underscoring truthfulness as the standard so shrewd is that there’s already strong evidence Clinton will fall short of it. After all, Monica Lewinsky — both on tape and in what her lawyer has told investigators — has described her relationship with Clinton as sexual.
Lewinsky is bound to tell her story in public. A deal with Ken Starr, the independent counsel, for testimony before a grand jury would not preclude a later appearance before a congressional committee or in TV interviews. When that happens and assuming her story hasn’t changed, the standard for truthfulness set by Clinton would be breached. Lewinsky’s emergence would be a big enough bombshell to change the dynamics of the scandal, says pollster John Zogby. Then, it might be time for Republicans to step up their criticism, just as Democrats did as Watergate wrongdoing was laid out in Senate hearings. Still, Republicans should be careful who does the criticizing. Few Republicans besides Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois have the credibility to carry it off, according to Zogby.
The truth is, if the scandal goes this far, it probably won’t make much difference what Republicans say. The scandal will have a momentum of its own, just like Watergate. In a comparable period in early 1973, around the time of the State of the Union, Nixon’s popularity peaked at 67 percent. In subsequent months, it drifted down to the high 40s, until the next bombshell, the televised Senate Watergate hearings. Within two months, Nixon had dropped 15 to 20 more points in polls, and things never got better for him. Of course, the Clinton sex scandal may be sufficiently different from Watergate that this won’t occur. Maybe Clinton’s current popularity won’t erode over the next few months. Maybe when Lewinsky and others put a public face on allegations against the president, it won’t amount to a bombshell. But I’m betting it will.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
