During his first term in office, Bill Clinton raised an astonishing amount of campaign cash — nearly $ 40 million — with a program of Map Room coffees and Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers for major Democratic donors. Perhaps it bothers you that the president routinely and systematically used the hypnotizing thrill of White House access to snap open rich people’s checkbooks. His aides are eager to put your mind at ease. That’s not what happened, they insist.
The White House counsel’s office now helpfully distributes a xeroxed newsclipping in which Clinton buddy Garry Mauro, the state land commissioner of Texas, is quoted about a coffee he helped organize last August. “We specifically did not make the White House event a fund-raiser,” Mauro says. ” Every single person who went to the White House had already given the money.”
What, then? Private meetings with the president were “merely” an after-the- fact reward for high-dollar contributions, the invitations having been sold, according to numerous unrebutted newspaper accounts, at an explicit price? No, no, no, no, no, administration spokespeople avow; that’s not what happened, either. The coffees and overnights came first, reports Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry. Only later would the Democratic National Committee ” approach those who attended to see if they had been motivated to give more funds or to, in some cases, get a response after a presentation by the president.”
We’re back to our original suspicion, in that case. Bill Clinton wasn’t the product; he was the salesman. Or he was a bit of both; it’s hard to tell. And it doesn’t really matter, Clinton’s spinners argue. No one has yet been charged with directly asking a guest for money on White House property — which would have been illegal. So the president’s open-house routine, Mike McCurry advises the media, cannot accurately be called fund-raising. ” Technically” speaking.
But only technically. The 500-plus pages of fundraising documents delivered under threat of subpoena to congressional investigators by former Clinton deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes — and preemptively released by the White House last week — make abundantly clear that the Democratic party has spent four years transforming the executive mansion into a VIP lounge for its wealthiest benefactors. At the president’s direction, and with the president’s constant cooperation.
Ickes’s handwritten notes from a May 1994 meeting with Clinton included reference to “BC questions about our lack of fund-raising” and indicated that “BC will have breakfast to raise $ .” In dozens of memoranda faxed back and forth between the DNC and the West Wing over the next few years, various White House activities — receptions, lunches, movie viewings, and donor ” servicing dinners” starring Clinton, Gore, and both men’s wives — were repeatedly identified as “fund-raising events” or “fund-raising dates” or ” fund-raisers” or elements of a “fund-raising plan.” Clinton personally approved DNC direct-mail fundraising appeals, even those he did not sign himself. Clinton personally approved a January 5, 1995, DNC finance-division proposal that he host White House “breakfast, lunch or coffee dates” designed to “energize our key people.”
It was on the back of that memo — and in that context, no other — that the president wrote out his wish for the coffee program to be pursued ” promptly” and for a complete list of possible invitees “at 100,000 or more” and “50,000 or more.” On the same page, Clinton wrote that he was “ready to start overnights right away.” A blizzard of White House scheduling requests for coffee invitations to “top fund-raisers from across the country” began showing up in Ickes’s files almost immediately thereafter. By January 1996, Clinton deputy chief of staff Evelyn Lieberman advised Ickes and Leon Panetta that “critical” fund-raising requirements might force staff time with the president to be “truncated or eliminated” in favor of on-site donor coffees.
Not illegal maybe, but gross beyond dispute — and beyond serious comparison with any White House political initiative ever before undertaken in our history. It is not true that, as Beltway wisdom infected by Perotista outrage insists, “everybody does it.” Nobody did this before, no matter what the president’s aides say. Of course, they know that only a handful of Americans will have the patience necessary to reach that conclusion independently by wading through the entire Ickes documentary library. So they are ready with their own summary characterizations of the evidence.
It is the DNC’s fault, Mike McCurry intimates, since “how they raise the money off these events or how they went off to solicit people who were there, that’s really their business and they should more appropriately address it.”
It is everyone’s fault, the president himself suggests: “Anyone who is involved in politics must accept responsibility for this problem and take responsibility to repair it.”
The most preposterously robotic spin of all comes from the preposterously robotic Ann Lewis, White House deputy director of communications. The colfees and overnights are no one’s fault, she says. They are good things — proof that the president and Mrs. Clinton enjoyed “spending time with their friends” and people who “weren’t friends yet.” Without such visits, it would be “frighteningly easy for a president to get isolated.”
Lewis makes this astounding pronouncement with a perfectly straight face, looking for all the world like a normal human being who’s telling the truth. And therein lies the most depressing and least soluble aspect of this latest – – but certainly not last — scandal surrounding Bill Clinton. Faced with an embarrassing revelation, he and his colleagues have a single, instinctive, and overriding impulse. They lie about it.
There is no law that Congress might pass to ban mendacity in the White House. There is no reason to expect that this administration might change its spots these next four years. We’re probably stuck with the Clinton crowd as they are. The year 2001 cannot come soon enough.
David Tell, for the Editors
