Politics of the Tin Ear
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Politics of the Tin Ear CALL it the politics of the tin ear or the self-inflicted wound. In an age of pervasive public pulse-taking, the...
...Once again the Administration left the impression of waving around a lot of aircraft for show...
...This month Holbrooke returned to Belgrade for nine days of negotiation that produced a new agreement on October 13...
...Empty Threats Last May Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke persuaded President Slobodan Milosevic to meet with Ibrahim Rugova, a leader of Kosovo Province's majority ethnic Albanian community, and as a reward recommended easing sanctions against Yugoslavia...
...Some legislators say that given the gravity of impeachment, they must act on principle, regardless of public emotions...
...Terminal Frustration I think I heard one Congressman say on television that the drive for impeachment "looks like a runaway train in uncharted waters...
...And especially whether they gain enough Senate seats to bring them, perhaps with some Democratic support, within hailing distance of the 67 votes needed to unseat the President...
...Once that would have sent shudders throughout the Western world, fearing a relapse into totalitarianism...
...In one respect, however, they were charted...
...During the Iraq crisis, a Clinton adviser was quoted as saying, "You don't wave around a lot of aircraft for show if you're a great power...
...that cost the GOP heavily in the 1996 balloting and contributed to Clinton's re-election...
...It is possible, therefore, that after the election, and perhaps even prior to public hearings, we will begin to hear serious talk of a deal involving some form of reprimand...
...The Republicans made sure this would not happen in 1998 by enacting a series of stopgap spending measures while wrestling with the Democrats in fiscal year overtime...
...That had the effect of saddling West German taxpayers with a burden of $100 billion a year...
...He had also approved illegal wiretapping and planned to bring intelligence agencies into a group that would explicitly carry out illegal surveillance of dissidents...
...Probably his most serious mistake was celebrating reunification by making the East German mark instantly convertible with West German currency...
...It took G-man J. Edgar Hoover to shoot down that idea...
...It is not hard to read Milosevic...
...Far from complying, Iraq effectively halted inspection, and nothing happened...
...How do these mistakes happen...
...Where did Helmut Kohl, the longestserving German Chancellor since Bismarck (16 years), go wrong...
...That sounded like what happened with Yugoslavia last May and with Iraq last February...
...But recycling the language of the Nixon impeachment resolution will not make bad boy Bill Clinton into co-conspirator Richard Nixon...
...Seventy-one per cent of the respondents said that the Republicans were mainly interested in hurting Clinton, not in finding out the truth...
...The Republican House majority investigating a Democratic President sought to offer a mirror image of the Democratic majority investigating a Republican President in 1974...
...He conceded only that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was "not appropriate" and denounced Independent Counsel Kenneth W Starr...
...They have moved from conservatism to what is called "the New Center," whose policies of industrial modernization and reform of the welfare state have something in common with the Clintonian New Democrats...
...A triumphant Senator Phil Gramm of Texas chortled on television, "Have you missed the government...
...In the impeachment battle, though, both sides have made serious missteps...
...Important to Clinton's fate is whether the Republicans pick up significantly more than the expected five or six House seats...
...At 68, Kohl is older than other Western leaders...
...That dictated cautious policies and a yearning to be European rather than simply German...
...I recalled that during the weekend of the latest ultimatum to Milosevic, as I watched on television B-52 bombers moving from one place to another...
...After the Watergate break-in, to cover up high-level involvement in the conspiracy, Nixon explicitly talked of using a million dollars in hush money for convicted criminals...
...That would give the impeachment process a big shot in the arm...
...He was 15, and an automatic member of the Hitler Youth, when Germany surrendered in 1945...
...When the Belgrade agreement was reached, American officials said that the sword was still poised over Serbia, that the clock was still ticking...
...That wasn't the first such miscalculation...
...German baby boomers are acting like baby boomers in Britain, France and Italy...
...Kohl may well consider that despite all he did to unify Germany and bring it into Europe, he lost touch with the new generation of Germans to whom Hitler is only an unpleasant, distant memory...
...The conventional wisdom is that impeachable offenses are whatever the House says they are...
...He takes three steps forward and one step back when it seems possible that the reluctant superpower may undertake military action...
...Democrats pushed in vain for a Thanksgiving deadline...
...In the course of the Holbrooke-Milosevic exchanges, NATO went through an elaborate countdown to air strikes in Serbia...
...On February 23, after United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan worked out an agreement with Iraq to resolve a crisis over weapons inspections, President Clinton said American forces would remain on station until he was satisfied that Baghdad was complying...
...The Representatives who wrote the articles of impeachment against Nixon were confident of a more than two-thirds vote for conviction in the Senate...
...The search for respectability was further reflected in the inclusion of the word "democratic" in the names of virtually every party—Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Free Democrats...
...Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde relied on precedents set by then Democratic Chairman Peter W. Rodino in refusing to accept time limits or a narrowed scope...
...Even the Communists in East Germany metamorphosed into the Party of Democratic Socialism...
...Hence the $ 1.7 trillion budget finally announced on October 15...
...It calls for a pullback of some Serbian forces and monitoring by an international civilian corps to be recruited for that purpose...
...The language of the enabling resolution is almost word for word the same...
...Nevertheless, making threats that turn out to be empty destroys this nation's credibility...
...an FBI investigation of me was cited as one example of his abuse of power...
...But there is a third factor: Politicians often play to their organized and insistent core constituencies—in this case the Republicans are responding to the Christian Right—even at the risk of a backlash among the less ideological...
...Chancellor Kohl also became identified with an 11 per cent unemployment rate...
...In addition, he tried to get the CIA to take the rap for Watergate...
...The President missed the boat in his fourminute television speech last August 17, following his grand jury appearance...
...Before the break-in at Democratic headquarters, he had approved a break-in at the office of a psychiatrist and had suggested breaking into the Brookings Institution...
...In fairness, it must be said that there is no easy solution—by now maybe no solution at all—to the Kosovo problem...
...Following the perfunctory meeting, Milosevic launched an assault of massacre proportions that destroyed 500 villages and left a quartermillion homeless refugees...
...Let me first note a possible bias, because I was mentioned in the Nixon bill of impeachment...
...In an age of pervasive public pulse-taking, the mistakes President Bill Clinton and his adversaries seem to make in reading the mood of the people are remarkable...
...Assuming this generation of impeachers remains short of that certainty, the process will become—other than a means of stigmatizing the President—an exercise in terminal frustration, unsupported by abored and/or outraged citizenry...
...In the 1960s, when I reported from Germany, the winning slogan was still Konrad Adenauer's "Keine Experimente" (No experiments), reflecting a yearning for stability in a nation that had lost its moorings...
...The short answer was a resounding "Yes...
...A Vote for Change For the first time in the half-century of the post-Hitler German republic, the electorate has been bold enough to oust an incumbent Chancellor and vote for change...
...But one big difference is that the investigation of Richard M. Nixon was completed well before the 1974 elections, and the Clinton inquiry will not really begin until after the elections on November 3. They may have a critical bearing on how long and how vigorously Clinton is pursued...
...The question most frequently asked of a journalist who covered the Nixon years is: How does the present situation compare with Watergate...
...Others say that in a period of volatility, with no central issue like war or depression, public sentiment tends to be very changeable...
...No longer...
...Recent evidence was provided by a Washington Post survey done after the House of Representatives voted on October 8 for a wide-open impeachment inquiry of indefinite duration...
...Having said that, I have no difficulty declaring that, at least as I see it, what President Clinton may be charged with—perjury or something close to it in trying to cover up his relationship with Monica Lewinsky—bears little resemblance to what had already been proven against President Nixon when the impeachment proceedings started...
...That did not play well, least of all in Washington, where the Post's David Broder called it "truly Nixonian.'The Republicans, in turn, released Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony hoping to show him at his worst, and instead stimulated his rebound...
...Meanwhile, in Kosovo, his six-month campaign may have created an accomplished fact that will make restoration of the status quo virtually impossible...
...Vividly remembered is December 1995, when the newly-empowered Contract With America Republicans, believing they held the winning hand in a budget confrontation with the White House, allowed the government to be shut down...
...It showed the approval rating for Congress, and for Republican candidates, shrinking significantly among the crucial groups of likely voters and swing voters...
...He has tearfully told of his brother being killed in the War and of his family surviving on American CARE packages...
...He may be the last of the European leaders conditioned by World War II...
...Clarity about the road ahead will only come on Election Day...
...Chairman Hyde talks of a year-end wrap-up...
Vol. 81 • October 1998 • No. 11
