JOHN PODESTA, the deputy White House chief of staff, gathered a dozen “talkers” in his office two days after President Clinton addressed the nation about Monica Lewinsky. Talkers? You know, the Washington lawyers, consultants, and ex-administration officials who appear on TV chat shows and defend the president. Former Clinton scandal-spinner Lanny Davis was there. So were Democratic lawyer Stanley Brand and former Clinton aide Don Baer.
Podesta suggested several things, such as polls, they’d do well to mention on the tube. He cited results of post-speech surveys that showed both Clinton’s job-performance rating and public distaste for Ken Starr’s investigation as high as ever. Later, an aide explained the White House intends to emphasize to the gulf between anti-Clinton sentiment inside the Beltway and the more favorable climate for the president outside Washington. And if all goes well, the Beltway will see it’s out of sync with America and ease up on Clinton.
The Beltway did back off a bit after the Lewinsky affair broke in January, but it won’t again. Now the scandal has entered a new phase that’s far more perilous for the president. Call it the Watergate phase, because the scenario that unfolded a quarter-century ago is likely to repeat itself. In Watergate, people did not instantly rise up and demand the head of President Nixon. Instead, the Beltway (Democrats, moderate Republicans, the press) led and the people eventually followed. The scandal was more than a year old before Nixon’s poll numbers began to decline sharply. This time, too, the Beltway (Ken Starr, the press) is leading. The public, whose support for Clinton is as shallow as it was for Nixon, will fall in line.
I’m hardly the only one to recognize that the polls the White House finds so encouraging are politically insignificant. A number of Democratic consultants are skeptical of a strategy that relies on current poll numbers’ enduring. “I’ve always been leery of them,” says Bob Beckel, who ran Walter Mondale’s campaign in 1984. He says two of the three legs holding up Clinton’s popularity have already been chopped off. Clinton’s personality? It’s now seen as deceitful, not charming. His ability to provide an activist, usually centrist brand of governing? It requires a willingness by Republicans to compromise on terms Clinton finds palatable. Forget that. Which leaves the economy as the only source of his popularity, and it’s shaky.
Another skeptic about the polls is Jeffrey Bell, a Republican consultant now advising Gary Bauer, a likely presidential candidate in 2000. There’s widespread misunderstanding, Bell says, of how public opinion works. “As was equally true in Watergate, most voters have little or no desire to take down a presidency, particularly one they have voted for twice,” according to Bell. “As long as the investigation is incomplete, voters are able to defer confronting a set of facts they would rather not confront at all, indeed would rather did not exist at all. . . . And the truth is that Starr has issued not a single report on even one major element of his investigation.” Thus the issues in the scandal so far have been questions about process: Is the independent counsel out of control? Can a “protective privilege” be invoked to keep Secret Service agents from testifying? Will Clinton testify?
Now, with the appearances of Lewinsky and Clinton before the grand jury, the focus is turning to real issues of sex, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The president’s speech furthered this shift, and Starr’s report to Congress, expected around Labor Day, will complete the transformation. (In Watergate, the shift to real issues came with the sensational Senate hearings in the summer of 1973.) The questions will be: What kind of sex was performed in the Oval Office suite and by whom? Also, did Clinton tell the truth about his sexual relationship with Lewinsky when questioned, under oath, by Paula Jones’s attorneys and later before Starr’s grand jury? And what about the gifts the president gave Lewinsky? Did his retrieval of them after they’d been subpoenaed amount to obstruction of justice? Worst of all for Clinton, sordid details about his trysts have begun leaking, mostly from Monica’s camp. These — the stained dress, for example, and the kinky sex — rivet the public and are ruinous to what’s left of the president’s reputation.
There are two other developments that will affect the Beltway’s leadership in resolving the scandal. One is the Washington establishment’s turning away from Clinton. This was epitomized by the brutal response to the speech by David Broder of the Washington Post. Broder, likeable and enormously respected, is a bell-wether, pointing the way for the media and everyone else in the Beltway elite. He zinged Clinton as a prolific liar and man of “staggering” selfishness. When Clinton asserted that Starr’s probe has lasted too long, “his words could equally well have applied to his own tenure,” Broder wrote. TV’s prime establishment figure, Cokie Roberts of ABC, has been a Clinton critic far longer. After the speech, she took a new tack, suggesting the political class in Washington has “a responsibility to lead public opinion instead of following it.” She clearly intends to.
The other new development is the spillover of the scandal into this fall’s congressional campaigns. Despite the timidity of Republican leaders, GOP candidates are raising the issue. In South Carolina, Republican state chairman Henry McMaster told the Greenville News, “We’ll use it.” And congressman Bob Inglis is doing exactly that in his Senate race against Fritz Hollings. If Clinton perjured himself, he should be impeached, Inglis said after the speech. Hollings declined to comment. But — and this is the important point — he’ll be forced to by Inglis or reporters. And this sequence will be repeated in races all over the country. Once the scandal becomes a lively political issue, it’s obviously no longer a mere matter of process. True, Starr’s role may still be debated. But I suspect Republican candidates and the press will spend a lot more time on Clinton and coerce Democrats into responding.
One person at the White House seems skittish about relying on polls to help ward off impeachment or forced resignation — the president. That’s why he made such an ostentatious display of launching anti-terrorist raids in Sudan and Afghanistan. “All that matters is whether Bill Clinton can establish in the public’s mind that he can still do the job of president,” says a Clinton adviser. Polls indicating people approve of his job performance in the past aren’t enough. He must show he’s not frozen in place by the scandal and can lead in the future. Along that line, here’s a poll question that might really tell us something: Do you believe Clinton, though involved in a sex scandal, can continue to lead the nation effectively? If 70 percent of Americans say yes after they’ve been treated to weeks of ribald details and heard what’s in Starr’s report, then they may not be susceptible to the Beltway’s leadership after all. But I’m betting they are.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
