TRASHING KENNETH STARR

That was in December 1996. A year and a half later, all pretense has disappeared. White House employees routinely go on television to denounce Ken Starr personally and by name. In a Larry King appearance the other day, presidential adviser Paul Begala casually described Starr’s behavior as criminal, not to mention “frightening,” “absurd,” and “unfair.” Last week a number of administration officials, including the previously restrained Mike McCurry, called for a Justice Department investigation after an overheated magazine article alleged that Starr had “leaked” grand-jury information to reporters. The White House no longer even pretends to consider Starr’s investigation legitimate, and James Carville is proud to have started the trend. “Very seldom does a man have a chance to say he was a prophet,” Carville says.

Carville may have been the first Clinton partisan to attack the independent counsel publicly, but it’s clear that the anti-Starr propaganda machine had been under construction for some time. As early as 1995, says former Clinton confidant Dick Morris, George Stephanopoulos and other administration strategists were devising ways to discredit Starr. From the beginning, the model was the trashing of Al D’Amato, chairman of the Senate committee then looking into Whitewater. White House spinners portrayed D’Amato as out of control, a “bully” on a partisan crusade to destroy the president. The attack worked, and D’Amato’s poll numbers plummeted. Years later, D’Amato, running for reelection in New York, still bears the scars. A White House aide cheerfully cites a headline that ran in the Washington Post just last month: “D’Amato Shows Foes He Survived Whitewater.” In other words, it was D’Amato, not Clinton, who suffered politically from the Whitewater investigation.

In Starr’s case, tracking polls used by the White House showed the independent counsel particularly vulnerable to charges of partisanship. It was obvious, says Morris, what to do next: “Take Starr off the pedestal as a prosecutor and make him a partisan adversary, change him from a special prosecutor into a Republican U.S. Senator, so he essentially becomes a D’Amato whom you can discount, as opposed to an Archibald Cox whom you can’t.” Starr’s efforts to defend himself, the occasional flashes of anger during his impromptu driveway press conferences, couldn’t have been more effective if they had been scripted by the White House. “By baiting him into attacking back,” Morris says, “it created the tit-for-tat which brings him down to the level of a partisan and away from the level of an impartial investigative counsel. We used to refer to it as ‘lift and loft’ — lifting Clinton above the fight.”

Destroying a person’s reputation is messy work, and not everyone in the White House enjoyed it. “Whenever I went off the facts and into attacks on Starr, I felt very uncomfortable,” says Lanny Davis, who must have spent much of his tenure as special counsel to the president feeling uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the strategy worked. By the time Monica Lewinsky became famous, Starr’s approval ratings were below even D’Amato’s.

Strictly speaking, poll numbers shouldn’t be relevant to a criminal investigation, but in this investigation they are. Starr’s unpopularity gives Clinton rhetorical cover for continuing to refuse to testify before a grand jury — Why, his supporters will ask, should the president participate in his own political lynching? — and it cannot help but weaken the independent counsel’s hand as he negotiates with Monica Lewinsky’s new lawyers. The target audience for the administration’s attack on Starr, however, is Congress, which will receive Starr’s final report on the investigation. “I’m going to be there to diminish the political impact of the report,” James Carville says bluntly. “That’s been my strategy from Day One. On the day Starr releases that report, the stronger the president is and the weaker he is, the better we are.”

So far, the White House seems confident that support for Starr among congressional Republicans remains shaky, particularly following Starr’s disastrous interview with Brill’s Content. Republicans, notes one Congress-watcher in the White House, “don’t seem to be rushing forward to defend Starr.” Nor has the Office of Independent Counsel done much to defend itself on Capitol Hill. “We’re certainly not trying to lobby to shore up support,” says one of Starr’s deputies, who concedes that the controversy over Brill’s article “won’t be hastening” a report to Congress. “We’re keeping communications to a minimum. Maybe that’s unwise.”

Maybe it is. There’s no evidence yet that Starr’s investigation will be used by either party as a prominent campaign issue in the fall elections. But to the extent Starr’s name does surface in political races, the White House believes, it can only help the president. “The mass of America thinks it’s all politics anyway,” says one Clinton adviser. “If Starr becomes an issue, it makes the point more clear.”

Meanwhile, as the independent counsel’s report to Congress becomes imminent, expect the criticism of Starr to grow louder. “It will assume more the aspect of baiting, so that Starr gets drawn into a slugging match,” says Dick Morris. When the report does appear, Morris predicts an amplified version of the usual White House reaction to damaging news: “It will be, ‘It’s partisan, this is what we’ve been expecting all along, consider its source,’ that kind of stuff.”

How can Starr counter what so far has been a remarkably effective spin? Lanny Davis, of all people, has some advice. “Starr’s best tactic,” Davis says, “would be not to reach any conclusions but simply to lay out a factual narrative with citations to evidence and specifically say, ‘I’m not going to suggest to the Congress any conclusions from these facts, I’m just going to lay them out.'”

Davis has spent much of the last year and a half attacking Starr on television, so it’s difficult to take his recommendation at face value. Still, it’s not a bad idea. And, says Davis, the report may not even require editorial comment. “I strongly support withholding judgment about the value of that report and focusing on the evidence and facts that the report sets out,” Davis says, suddenly sounding quite sober, even repentant, on the subject. “I think the temptation, which I have shared in, is to characterize the report ahead of time as a political document. The facts ultimately are going to determine the outcome here, and we ought to focus on those facts once the report is issued.”

It now seems clear the report will indeed be issued, and by Ken Starr. For all the talk from the White House about how Starr is a deranged partisan who frequently breaks the law, virtually no one in Washington seems to take seriously the idea that he will be fired. In fact, Janet Reno could cancel Starr’s job — though not the investigation he was hired to perform — tomorrow, and if half of what Paul Begala says is true, she should. But for the moment at least, the consensus is that she won’t. “They would never do it now,” says Dick Morris. “They have far too much invested in Kenneth Starr to get rid of him. They have spent so much time and energy making him into a bad guy that there’s no way they’d want to start all over with somebody else.” An attorney in Ken Starr’s office agrees: “They’d rather keep us hobbled.” On the other hand, he says, “however enfeebled we may be, we have the power of indictment, things like that.”

It is the “things like that” that in the end may render even the best White House spin irrelevant.

Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.