Officially, at least, the White House line remains that President Clinton’s August 17 mea-sorta-culpa speech achieved a thorough-going catharsis on the Monica Lewinsky matter — both for him personally and for all America. He has been “quite heartened by the reaction,” Clinton surreally suggested at his Moscow press conference last Wednesday, and while he will “continue to go through this personal process in an appropriate way,” it is otherwise “time for us to now go back to the work of the country and the people.”
The president’s intended work schedule is already taking shape. This week Clinton will attend a White House-organized prayer breakfast with “religious leaders,” all of them no doubt hand-picked for their willingness to refrain from comment on the president’s observance of the Seventh Commandment. Next week, he will kick off a nationwide swing of big-dollar DNC fund-raisers. The week after that, Clinton will lead — ably and enablingly supported by his wife, Vice President Gore, and the prime ministers of Britain and Italy — a day-long seminar on global economics at New York University Law School. Just as if nothing had happened. Monica who?
Trouble is, few other politicians travel so imperturbably from fiction to fiction as William Jefferson Clinton. And congressional Democrats, without whom the president’s “back to work” efforts won’t amount to spit, haven’t yet recovered from the passing of Chapter One, during which everyone pretended it wasn’t for sure that Clinton did have sex with the intern. That basic lie has now been exploded — by the president himself — and the explosion obviously does not feel like cathartic release. No, it just plain hurts.
On September 1, Senate Democrats held their first weekly luncheon of the fall congressional session. The meeting, ostensibly devoted to the party’s “substantive policy agenda,” seems actually to have been absorbed entirely with strategizing over the Lewinsky fiasco. What to do? The people’s business, minority leader Tom Daschle gamely told reporters when he finally emerged, ducking the Monica question and feigning optimism. But back in the lunch room, a page of scribbled notes left behind by one careless Democratic senator revealed the only true mood. In the middle of this sheet, in big, block letters emphasized by stabbing arrows, appeared three words: “WE ARE DOOMED.”
Two days later, the disquiet burst into view when Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a Clinton friend of nearly 30 years’ standing, took to the Senate floor to excoriate the president for his behavior — and to carpet-bomb the main White House defense. Clinton’s Lewinsky affair, Lieberman insisted, is not a mildly “inappropriate” and safely “private” misadventure; it is “disgraceful” and “immoral,” and the president’s bad example has “profound public consequences.” Nor is it possible, Lieberman went on, for the nation simply “to move on and get this matter behind us.” Clinton’s “transgressions” — including his “intentional and premeditated decision” to deceive the country for seven long months — are grave enough to require “some measure of public rebuke and accountability.”
Forced to respond to this attack the next day, Clinton, in Ireland, said, “I have nothing else to say” beyond what “I’ve already said”: that “I’m sorry about it.” Which, in fact, he hadn’t previously said. “Basically,” the president fibbed, “I agree with what [Lieberman] said.”
“Basically,” however, Clinton doesn’t agree with Lieberman at all, and he isn’t very sorry, either. Not sorry enough to accept a congressional resolution of reprimand or censure, for example, the minimum “public rebuke” Lieberman seems to consider appropriate. Last Friday’s Washington Post reported that the White House will vigorously and vehemently contest, as fundamentally undeserved, any form of official sanction for the Lewinsky scandal.
In the short term, it appears, the White House will fight this battle by time-tested Clintonian means. There will be, above all, a smear campaign against the president’s current and potential critics. Lieberman, of course, is a man of cautious and moderate temperament, so he is presumably beyond reproach. But hardly anyone else is safe from White House slime.
Shortly after retiring representative Paul McHale of Pennsylvania became the first congressional Democrat to call for the president’s resignation, CNBC hack Geraldo Rivera “got a call from my source very close to President Clinton who reminded me that there was a controversy about Rep. McHale’s candor in terms of the medals he won in the armed forces of the United States.” This “controversy,” it soon turned out, was imaginary. So the next day, Rivera invented a new one, citing the Navy Times to substantiate a charge that McHale had once exaggerated his military duties in Operation Desert Storm. This, too, proved false; Navy Times has never reported any such thing. But Rivera was undeterred, waving before the cameras old copies of the Allentown Morning Call — which “attested,” he alleged, to a genuine past “dispute” over the congressman’s war record. That paper has since editorially condemned Rivera as “dishonest.”
Never mind. On August 27, after conferring with his big brother, Roger Clinton told CNN’s Larry King that “some of the political people” contemplating a denunciation of the president had “best watch themselves because of the old glass-house story.” Be “very careful,” Roger warned. The following day, the White House-friendly Internet tabloid Salon posted a farrago of sexual innuendoes about Newt Gingrich on its Web site. Then, almost immediately, word began circulating through Washington that Clinton allies were aiding and abetting a forthcoming Vanity Fair story on Rep. Dan Burton’s sex life. And at almost exactly the same moment, a reporter we know got a telephone call from a high-level White House official who suggested that the reporter take a look at the sexual practices of still another prominent congressional Republican.
Paul McHale, for his part, thinks he knows who’s running this disgusting operation. “I suspect this individual is a nationally known figure very close to the president,” he says. “I have a very good a very good idea who it is.” So do we. The man who called our reporter acquaintance was Sidney Blumenthal.
While all this mud is being slung, the White House is also busily leaking — and preemptively spinning — whatever damaging disclosures it imagines might be contained in Kenneth Starr’s forthcoming report to Congress. The leaks involve highly selective accounts of various incriminating sequences of events. And the explanations so far offered for these events — by unnamed “Clinton advisers” — strain credulity. Even so, interesting details continually emerge.
Consider, for instance, the new administration-approved version of its job-search efforts on Monica Lewinsky’s behalf. Clinton, it turns out, was involved from the start. Early last year, he asked deputy personnel chief Marsha Scott to interview Lewinsky for a possible return assignment at the White House. And in the second such interview, Scott’s lawyer has told the Washington Post, Lewinsky bitterly complained about her banishment to the Pentagon. “I never had an affair with the president,” she said, “but all the others who have get to stay.”
All the others who had affairs with the president? This is exculpatory?
Yuck. Joe Lieberman wants Congress to defy the president’s wishes and proceed in a “deliberate and responsible” manner with official consideration of the way Bill Clinton has debased the nation’s highest office. We want that, too. The key question, though, is precisely when this inquiry will begin in earnest.
Neither party, assuming the Starr report is delivered in the next couple of weeks, is instinctively eager to get underway. Democrats want to conduct their fall campaigns with as little Lewinsky static as possible. Republicans are convinced that things are going just fine, thank you, and are concerned that any pre-election hearings on the scandal might tar them with the brush of “excessive partisanship.” Both parties, in other words, by standard calculations, have every incentive to accept the Starr report, refer it to the House Judiciary Committee, and then not do anything serious about it until the new Congress convenes after New Year’s Day.
But this is what cannot be allowed to happen. Sen. Lieberman says his “feelings of disappointment and anger” with the president “have not dissipated” over time. In this respect, let’s face it, he is an unusual man. America has shown a quite shocking capacity to dull itself to “old news” about Bill Clinton. By January, even a devastating report from the independent counsel may well seem both old and dull, and therefore not worth acting on. Which phenomenon — the psychology of delay — is exactly what the White House is counting on as its best hope to prevent a formal censure of the president. Or worse.
Lieberman was right to insist on “public rebuke and accountability” for the president’s behavior in the Lewinsky scandal. This magazine has already expressed its judgment that Clinton’s conduct falls beneath the de minimus standards of the presidency. But Congress, as an institution, speaks for the country as a whole, and its elected officials, before they join such a judgment, will want to wait for full documentary evidence. Fair enough — with one important proviso.
When the Starr report finally appears, the waiting period should end at once. The House Judiciary Committee should begin its deliberations immediately. It should quickly make available to other members of Congress and the public as much information as possible. This difficult work will take time, and the committee should have such time as it needs; Newt Gingrich should consider keeping the House in session for most of October — and beyond — if necessary. And if it all interrupts or diverts attention from the fall reelection campaign . . . well then, so be it.
For, really, after all: Our president’s fitness for office is in serious doubt. There is no more important question that today confronts the Congress — and the American people.
David Tell, for the Editors
