HOW ARE THINGS GOING at the scandal-plagued White House? Swimmingly, says Dick Morris, the former political adviser to President Clinton. Morris is gone from Clinton’s side, but his strategy is not forgotten. Every day, the president produces a fresh nugget of good news. One day it’s a ban on human cloning, the next a visit to flood sites in Arkansas, the next an order requiring child-safety locks on the guns of federal law enforcement officers. This stuff is sufficiently newsworthy to get media coverage and makes a real impression on people that scandal stories don’t, Morris insists. Better yet, Clinton doesn’t need Morris around to pursue the strategy. “That’s why it was so brilliant,” Morris says.
Partly brilliant would be a better way of putting it. “If Morris is going to take credit for everything,” says White House press secretary Mike McCurry, “he’s got to take credit for a scandal to begin the second term.” It was Morris’s massive ad campaign, after all, that led to furious fund-raising, then to the scandal that has destabilized the Clinton White House. In trying to cope, the president’s new staff isn’t the problem. Most of the top officials — Erskine Bowles, Rahm Emanuel, Doug Sosnik, John Podesta, Sylvia Matthews — are experienced, having worked at the White House in Clinton’s first term, only in lesser jobs. The problem is a scandal that’s bigger and more intense than any of them has faced before.
Vice President Al Gore, for instance. He especially is not practiced in dealing with allegations of illegality, and his response was wobbly. At first, Gore couldn’t decide how to respond to Bob Woodward’s story in the Washington Post on March 2 about fund-raising calls he’d made from the White House. He waited to see if McCurry could handle questions about it in his daily briefing. McCurry couldn’t, not having enough information. Instead, McCurry got into a nasty exchange with reporters, claiming their “standards for accuracy are lower than ours” in the White House press office.
A few hours later, Gore rushed to the press room, unprepared for the barrage of skeptical questions. An adviser who thought the vice president should pause 24 hours before going public didn’t press the point, so bent was Gore on instant vindication. In his press conference, he made questionable statements (“There is no controlling legal authority . . .”) he’ll have to live with for years. And he raised as many questions as he answered. Whom did he solicit? How much did he ask for? Where in the White House did he call from? Was it really a Democratic National Committee credit card he used? (It wasn’t.)
Nor did he make a strong legal case for his actions. Jack Quinn, the former White House counsel and once Gore’s chief of staff, eventually put together a legal argument in the vice president’s behalf. But it was too late to help Gore with the press. It might be too clever to have helped anyway. Quinn says Gore’s fund-raising calls were legal because the actual solicitation occurred where the calls were received — in other words, not on federal property.
The scandal all but engulfed Lanny Davis, the lawyer handpicked to answer (or deflect) scandal questions from reporters. Davis took over in December from Mark Fabiani, who now runs a foundation in La Jolla, California. Fabiani was regarded by reporters as accessible and credible. His parting advice to Davis was to spend a month shoveling out as much information as possible. It would build credibility. But Davis didn’t quite do that. Given the situation, it would have been difficult to build credibility anyway. Davis had been a strong defender of Clinton on Whitewater, and reporters had pent-up anger from being denied fund-raising information in the weeks before the election.
Davis’s worst moment came when he encountered Ted Koppel on Nightline on February 25. He said Koppel was making an “assumption without any evidence” about Clinton’s desire to invite $ 50,000 and $ 100,000 donors to the White House. “No, no,” Koppel snapped. “I’m just asking you based on what we have here and that’s all I can go on right now. And with all due respect to you, you weren’t even at the White House before December so you don’t have a clue what was going on there last year.” McCurry and other White House aides defend Davis’s performance. Nevertheless, the White House is trying to hire someone to work with Davis.
Three other things haven’t worked out as the White House had hoped, either. First, there is McCurry’s relentless effort to cajole reporters into investigating Republican fund-raising. In briefings, he not-too-subtly mentions donations by businessmen who advised Vice President Dan Quayle’s Competitiveness Council and by GOP fatcats with Team 100 or The Eagles. After the White House released 500 pages of documents held by former Clinton aide Harold Ickes, McCurry figured the press would demand Republican fund-raising documents. “By and large, the press hasn’t done that,” he now concedes. “I made an error in judgment.”
Second, there is Clinton’s slide into Nixon-like self-justification. Maybe the comparison is unfair (McCurry insists it is), but it’s what came to mind on March 4 when Clinton excused fund-raising excesses by suggesting they were necessary to save America. “We were fighting a battle, not simply for our reelection, but over the entire direction of the country for years to come, the most historic philosophical battle we’ve had in America in quite a long time,” he said. “I don’t regret the fact that we worked like crazy to raise enough money to keep from being rolled over by the biggest juggernaut this country had seen in a very long time.” Gingrich and Dole a juggernaut? Yep, that’s what he said.
Third, there’s the appointment of Colorado governor Roy Romer as general chair of the Democratic National Committee. Romer made a strong first appearance in Washington, vowing to clean up Democratic fund-raising. But he didn’t help the president much. Romer didn’t accept any of the White House’s alibis. He said the acceptance of a $ 50,000 check by Maggie Williams, chief of staff to Hillary Clinton, was not “the right way to do business.” The distinction that Williams hadn’t solicited the money and thus hadn’t broken the law, Romer said, is one “you don’t want to make.” As for Clinton’s defense that Republicans raised more money than Democrats, he said: “That does not give you an excuse for doing things illegal or improper.”
What Clinton needed was “a firebreak” to stop the scandal from racing forward. The phrase came from a Clinton ally, but the president didn’t like the options for achieving it. One was to declare he personally was at fault for fund-raising violations and was instituting, on his own, sweeping new rules for campaign money and rewards for donors. Another was to accede to a special prosecutor. Morris favors neither. He’s got just the sound bite for Clinton in opposing a special counsel: “Who do you want to decide on an appropriate prosecutor, Janet Reno or Jesse Helms?” (The idea is Helms would influence the judges who would name a special prosecutor. Got it?) At his press conference on March 7, Clinton declined to go along with a special prosecutor. But, wisely, he didn’t use the Morris line.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
