DICK MORRIS CAME TO LUNCH the other day. In the course of explaining why the president’s Monica Lewinsky caper is merely a sideshow, he ventured that a “silent plurality” of Americans objects more to having the story forced on its attention than it does to the underlying behavior. But don’t a lot of people object to lying, in principle? he was asked. Yes, Morris answered — ” but most of them aren’t in politics.”
Interesting theory. Maybe it’s true that political types think it’s okay for the president, caught more or less in flagrante and in the middle of a subsequent coverup, to issue a blanket denial. Maybe they even think it’s okay for him then to deflect any further questions about the matter.
But surely no one thinks it’s okay for Bill Clinton to turn loose his entire Praetorian guard of spin-whisperers against the one institution with legal authority to confirm the facts involved: Ken Starr’s court-sanctioned investigation. When the White House assaults Starr, after all, it is attempting to delegitimize an almost universally agreed-upon reality. Virtually no one “in politics” thinks Clinton and Lewinsky were comparing stamp collections when they were together — no matter what our judgment of the sex and lying and justice-obstruction. But the White House is fairly shrieking at Ken Starr for trying to prove what we already know. It is saying, in short, that two plus two equals five — and that anybody who raises his hand to complain about this new math is evil.
We’re talking about a truly astonishing, unprecedented level of corruption here: This is ontological subversion. You’d think it would make even politicians uncomfortable. Does it?
Give Democrats a pass on (dubious) grounds of party loyalty. Are Republicans, at least, prepared to offer a voluntary, unambiguous defense of Starr, as America’s best hope for an official judgment that two plus two still equals four? A few are. Not all that many, though.
Leading the few are senators John Kyl of Arizona and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Kyl was in Bosnia the weekend the anti-Starr crusade reached full boil, when Clinton lawyer David Kendall accused the independent counsel’s office, without evidence, of illegally leaking grand-jury material. Kyl got back Sunday night, read the papers, and took to the Senate floor the next day with a long, fierce statement about the integrity of the country’s legal system. He felt obliged, he said, “to speak out against those who are deliberately attempting to undermine that process.” It was “time to stop attacking Judge Starr,” and prosecutors working with Starr “need to be defended.”
McConnell followed Kyl to the Senate floor three days later. McConnell called the Clintonite Starr-bashing “unconscionable” and said it represents a “serious and deeply troubling crisis in our country.” McConnell declared himself appalled that a “smear campaign is being orchestrated by the White House,” that a “character assassination against the court-appointed independent prosecutor is authorized and approved by the president of the United States.” And “it must stop.”
Another Republican senator, Fred Thompson of Tennessee, raised the issue at a cattle-call of presumptive presidential candidates in Biloxi, Mississippi, on February 28. He said he thought it was “wise” for Congress thus far largely to have avoided comment on the Lewinsky scandal. But Thompson allowed as how, “if it becomes clear that the White House is intent upon a policy of smearing anyone who questions what they are doing and keeping the facts from the American people,” then it would be “time we got off the sidelines.” Because “the basic integrity of our government” would depend on it.
Two other GOP presidential hopefuls have at least once spoken in support of Starr. Steve Forbes has given a speech in which he urged that “everyone — independent, Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal — should say the integrity of the investigation must be allowed.” Conservative activist Gary Bauer last week sent a faxed memo to supporters complaining about “the smear campaign” against the independent counsel.
And one other all-but-announced candidate for 2000, Lamar Alexander, has lines in his standard stump speech about how Clinton “must either persuade the nation of his innocence or confess his misdeeds,” and how anything less would “fail the essential test of a president.” Last week, Alexander acknowledged that he hadn’t said much specifically about the assault on Starr. Once asked, though, he didn’t hesitate to assert that the behavior of Clinton’s adjutants was “brazen” and “frightening.” Alexander marvelled that a White House could engage in “a total-war, take-no-prisoners smear campaign against a person with so few consequences” and that the president could ” organize a campaign like this against a sworn officer of the government.” This sort of thing is “brand new, isn’t it? I don’t recall anything like this happening ever before.”
When first contacted for comment, Dan Quayle’s office said the former vice president had been “steering clear” of the Starr issue. But his aides then released a couple of sentences that Quayle would be inserting in a speech scheduled for this past weekend. He would criticize the White House for trying to “intimidate a law enforcement team” and would suggest that the president’s “real enemy is the truth.”
Missouri senator John Ashcroft and former HUD secretary Jack Kemp, each of them also intent on leading the GOP in 2000, haven’t kept pace, even with Quayle. Ashcroft’s office reported that he hadn’t yet addressed the attack on Starr in public and would decline the opportunity to do so for this story. Kemp’s press aide said “my inclination is no” when asked whether his boss would be willing to discuss the issue. After checking, he called back to say Kemp, as predicted, would be “unable” to talk about it.
Texas governor George W. Bush leads every Republican preference poll for 2000. Karen Hughes, his communications director, left a friendly phone message explaining that the governor “hasn’t said much” about the independent counsel’s office to date and thinks “waiting for the facts like everybody else” is the best policy.
Christina Martin, Newt Gingrich’s press secretary, said that the speaker ” doesn’t get asked about it all that often” but has, nevertheless, more than once defended Starr against White House criticism. She cited Gingrich’s remarks at the Biloxi cattle call on February 28. In the transcript the speaker’s office provided, there is only a single, passing reference to the independent counsel: “I don’t want to talk about Ken Starr; I don’t want to talk about scandals.” Maybe Gingrich hasn’t always been so circumspect about the White House siege of the independent counsel’s office; still, a search of the Nexis database of news stories comes up dry for relevant quotes.
But Rich Galen, a leading Gingrich lieutenant, has certainly discussed Starr. Starr, Galen has told at least one newspaper, is “the Helen Keller of American politics: he is deaf, dumb, and blind.” Galen doesn’t think much of the entire Lewinsky controversy, for that matter: “If you got everybody who lied about adultery in this town and put them in jail, you could have any parking space you wanted.”
Senate majority leader Trent Lott and Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch have stoutly backed Starr a couple of times, but only when asked direct questions about Clintonite attempts to undermine the investigation. Sen. Arlen Specter has been characteristically schizophrenic about Starr. He was the first prominent person to reject the latest wave of Democratic attacks on the independent counsel’s objectivity, way back on January 27. But Specter has since concluded, on national television, that Starr should never have been chosen to lead the investigation in the first place, since “so many people think he’s out to get the president.”
Finally, there is the GOP’s party apparatus itself, the Republican National Committee. Oddly enough, the RNC, which usually takes its lead from the Hill and not vice versa, has done more than anyone else to defend Starr. The committee’s communications wing has sent out a good-sized series of media fact sheets since early February, all of them designed to correct White House falsehoods directed at the independent counsel’s office. We have “a responsibility to set the record straight,” says RNC communications director Cliff May. But they have to do it rather quietly and delicately, too. “As soon as it looks partisan, you’ll hear [the White House] claim it’s part of a rightwing conspiracy.” Mike Collins, the RNC’s press secretary, pointed out that the president’s lawyers are eager to “bait everyone” in the GOP into ” doing something that makes it look like a partisan investigation.” The RNC has “avoided that temptation.”
May and Collins are honorable fellows, and their worries aren’t crazy, and their strategy isn’t imprudent. But the fact remains: The president of the United States, through his agents, is maligning an official inquiry into the most important political topic of the day. Representatives of that inquiry are not allowed, by law and custom, to respond in kind. And the media cannot report a response that no one else is making. So the argument is one-sided. And unless more than just a handful of Republicans offer the other side — and more than just occasionally — Americans will get no help making sense of what has happened and understanding what it means.
At issue is whether ordinary Americans will be permitted to obtain an accurate picture of their president’s character and behavior. Two plus two really does equal four, you know. Somebody’s got to say so with confidence.
David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
