Bill Clinton's pathetic excuses
CANNON, CARL M.
Bill Clinton's Pathetic Excuses By Carl M. Cannon President Clinton and the Democrats have responded to the burgeoning scandal surrounding their fund-raising methods with a symphony of defenses...
...In his new movie, Liar Liar, comedian Jim Carrey plays a lawyer who cannot tell a lie for one day...
...Not to worry, because no money was solicited on White House grounds, unless it was in the residential part of the White House...
...This is where FDR pored over maps charting the progress of the Allied troops during World War II...
...Moreover, the material released from Harold Ickes's files by the White House shows the following: • DNC co-chairman Don Fowler virtually reported to Ickes on fund-raising and other matters...
...I would remind you just that we knew that we had a very stiff challenge," Clinton said on March 4. "We were fighting a battle, not simply for our reelection, but over the entire direction of the country for years to come, and the most historic philosophical battle we've had in America in quite a long time over the direction of the budget, over our commitment to education, over whether we would dismantle large chunks of our environmental regulations and our public-health regulations...
...The instructions that I gave were, if someone who helped us wants to be considered for an appointment, they ought to be considered for the appointment, but they shouldn't get it unless they're qualified for it...
...But back in 1993 and 1994, when Democrats ran Congress, it was the House Democratic leaders who told the White House to back off—and campaign reform was quietly dropped as a priority...
...It's right there in Putting People First...
...It was a much smaller list than Clinton's...
...This memo, which was released by the White House, is dated January 5, 1993...
...IT'S NOT MY FAULT...
...Now the White House line is that no decision benefiting a contributor was made "solely" because the person gave money...
...To be sure, some GOP donors were on it, but a Bush spokesman emphasized that as far as Barbara and George Bush could recall, no one was on that list who hadn't entertained the Bushes as overnight guests in their homes first...
...Clinton has said that the 1994 elections, which swept Republicans to power in the House and Senate as well as in all major gubernatorial races, convinced him that the Democrats needed massive infusions of money just to survive...
...It scares people, and it can make the truth-teller sound like an arrogant cad...
...Nor did Williams's suggestion to Chung that he make out such a donation to the DNC constitute a solicitation, White House officials maintained...
...A funny thing happened as the post-Watergate reforms took effect: The Party of Big Business turned out to have far more small donors than the Party of the People...
...Afterwards, the president was regularly briefed by Ickes on how much was raised...
...It amounts to a claim that a sitting president can't get any ink or airtime unless he underwrites attack ads...
...Nixon was the name...
...For a time, each party maintained that contributors could give as much as they wanted to parties in every state as long as the money was used for "non-federal" purposes...
...Vice President Al Gore subsequently admitted making 50 solicitation calls for soft money from his White House office...
...And like Belushi's character, "Joliet Jake" Blues, the president and the Democrats are not really telling the truth...
...Oh well...
...First of all, the letterhead on McAuliffe's stationery states that David Wilhelm is chairman of the DNC...
...They found a big one—something now known as "in-kind" contributions—when they turned to organized labor for help...
...It's a defense that makes even some of Clinton's allies deeply uncomfortable, especially those of a certain age...
...The refrain, first uttered in the White House briefing room by Dee Dee Myers, was that the president wouldn't "unilaterally disarm...
...For starters, they don't include the money spent by organized labor to defeat Bob Dole, marginalize Newt Gingrich, and help Democratic candidates coast to coast...
...The Republicans did...
...My car wouldn't start...
...Rich Bond, George Bush's deputy campaign manager, took one look at this scheme and pronounced it "illegal on its face...
...The truth is often unpleasant, though...
...The fund-raising numbers he cites are accurate— they come from the Federal Election Commission— but they are also misleading...
...I'm glad we fought the battle of '95 and '96 and I'm glad it came out the way it did...
...Turns out it was a Clinton-Gore credit card instead...
...He believes that the stakes were high for the United States in the last election and that he, and not the Republicans, was on the right side of history...
...He claims that from 1995 through 1996, the three major Republican party committees raised $549 million, while the Democratic committees raised $332 million...
...Asked for his reaction when he heard the Clintons were using that room to host political fund-raisers, Elsey paused a long time and then said diplomatically, "I was a little surprised...
...Leo Troy, a professor at Rutgers University, estimates that this help would have cost 10 times as much as the AFL-CIO attack ads if the Democrats had had to pay for it...
...The penultimate Clinton excuse is that even if some of this fund-raising activity seems tacky, it didn't hurt the country because none of these donors ever really got anything for their money...
...Reformers were happy when Clinton won reelection, and a campaign-reform bill was immediately sent to Capitol Hill...
...People who help you, you try to stay in touch with them," Clinton said...
...The money now at issue is not hard money—nobody thinks there are any hijinks involved with hard money—but the huge "soft-money" donations to the national parties from fat cats and big business that have made a mockery of campaign-finance law...
...American politics, Clinton's manifesto reads, "is being held hostage by big money interests . . . and cliques of $100,000 donors [who] buy access to Congress and the White House...
...In answering pointed questions about the propriety of these coffees, as well as the Lincoln Bedroom overnights, Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry and other officials have invoked the Democrats' fourth line of defense: No money was ever solicited by White House officials or anyone else while on government property...
...But if they would never get to go in a thousand years, that no one would think they should have any business on a trade mission, and the only reason they were going to get to go was because they contributed to us, I didn't think they should go...
...His prescription was simple: "End the unlimited 'soft' money contributions that are funneled through national, state and local parties to presidential candidates...
...Five of them agreed, including Bill Clinton...
...But these assurances have not proven to be strictly true...
...By the time those supposedly fateful 1994 elections took place, the Democrats had raised $34.8 million in soft money...
...We do not solicit contributions here at the White House," McCurry said on February 20...
...In the first 15 months after Clinton's inauguration, the Democrats outraised the Republicans in soft money $20.5 million to $8.7 million...
...This galled the Democrats, and they searched for ways to even things out...
...On March 7, the president scaled back his "categorical" vow...
...I was running late...
...And anyway, there's nothing inherently wrong with mingling with your supporters and contributors...
...The donor, Chicago financier W. Clement Stone, was a close friend of Richard Nixon's...
...This sum, which seemed staggering at the time, turns out to have been chump change...
...And that $35 million doesn't include the thousands of phone banks, get-out-the-vote organizers, and professional field operatives that organized labor paid for in 1996...
...The Carterites wouldn't, and the Republicans found a nice little loophole of their own...
...Clinton first used it in 1995 when blasting Rush Limbaugh and other talk-radio types and was justly ridiculed for it...
...And we had to be aggressive and strong...
...This date clearly is a mistake—Clinton wasn't even in office yet...
...Even though the regulation they cited to protect her seemed to have been aimed at secretaries who inadvertently find campaign contributions while opening their bosses' mail...
...The Lincoln Bedroom is of hallowed historical importance because it is the place were the 16th president agonized over the carnage of the Civil War and where he unveiled the Emancipation Proclamation...
...Clinton himself took a keen interest in fund-raising, even to the point of micromanaging the effort...
...Bill Clinton's Pathetic Excuses By Carl M. Cannon President Clinton and the Democrats have responded to the burgeoning scandal surrounding their fund-raising methods with a symphony of defenses that sound plausible...
...I'm glad we stood up to it...
...More significant, the president's numbers include "hard money"—campaign contributions of $1,000 or less from individuals and $5,000 or less from political action committees...
...Under this standard, only a stupid president could ever be accused of giving out improper favors...
...Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has been tagged as the bad guy for stalling reform...
...That was true in January 1994, but not in January 1995...
...Clinton about the significance of another hallowed, soon-to-be-commercialized spot, the Map Room...
...And indeed, Mos-bacher's "Team 100" did outperform "Victory Fund '88...
...According to estimates by University of Southern California professor Herb Alexander, some $22 million in soft money was raised in 1984, most of it by the Republicans...
...We still fell over $200 million short of the money raised by the committees of the Republican party," Clinton said at a press conference on March 7. "But we are proud of Carl M. Cannon covers the White House for the Baltimore Sun...
...Take the memo from DNC finance director Terry McAuliffe calling on the White House to pamper big donors more and give them access to the president...
...Republicans would respond, in essence, that any law the Democrats bent, they could bend further by raising even more money...
...The outgunned Democrats would look for ways to subvert the laws they had authored...
...But the checks were to be mailed to the same Chauncey Street address in Boston where the Dukakis campaign was based—and from which money would be disbursed by the Dukakis campaign...
...In addition, documents confirm that the Democrats are fudging on the timing of their decision to seek big donations so aggressively...
...If someone wanted to go on a trade mission and was qualified and could make a contribution, they ought to get to go...
...The one concession his enemies were willing to make was that the president sincerely believed both these things...
...the fact that . . . we worked hard to raise money so that we could get our message out there and we would not be buried—literally buried—by the amount of money that the other side had at their disposal...
...There is little doubt that Clinton believes this...
...That's because although it is not pretty, it is the truth...
...In 1992, the watchdog group Common Cause asked the Democratic presidential candidates to take "the pledge" to do away with soft money if elected...
...Gore insisted that his lawyer's reading of the law barring solicitation of money on public property was that both parties had to be in a government building—not just the one making the call...
...In the Maggie Williams case, the counsel's office argued that since the $50,000 was going to the DNC and not the Clinton-Gore campaign, Williams's acceptance of the check didn't constitute a "receipt" of money, which would be illegal...
...Farmer's goal was $50 million—more than the $46 million the taxpayers were ponying up for each candidate in that year's general election...
...Second, we have all inadvertently misdated correspondence in January—writing down 1/2/96 when we mean 1/2/97...
...These days, Sen...
...The common reaction from historians and veterans of previous administrations alike was astonishment that anyone would think of renting it out...
...One of the more disturbing images from the 1972 campaign was a briefcase stuffed with $1.8 million in cash given to the Committee to Re-Elect the President...
...No list was available, but old Reagan administration hands such as Mike Deaver said that with the exception of Bob Hope, they couldn't remember anyone who wasn't a member of the family crashing in the Reagan White House overnight...
...This is revisionism...
...But federal disclosure forms show that if there was an arms race in soft money, it was Clinton, not the Republicans, who led it...
...It was a significant thing for America and we knew that we were going to be outspent and outraised, but we knew we had to do everything we could to at least be competitive enough to get our message out...
...He also believed he had the right to act as he wished because others had done it before him...
...And so it is with the final Clinton alibi for the Democrats' soft-money excesses...
...But after the devastating 1994 defeats, our party faced extinction in the face of a GOP fund-raising juggernaut...
...With this one well-chosen word, Clinton set a breathtakingly lax new standard: Granting favors to contributors is improper only if the contributor is unqualified to receive them...
...Thus did the president redefine the whole idea of what constitutes a quid pro quo...
...On to the "they all do it" excuse: Actually, they all didn't...
...And I think it would have been a very bad thing for the American people if that [Republican] budget had passed...
...We didn't invent the system of soft money, they say...
...After all, there were no quid pro quos...
...Moreover, estimates of how much money was to be raised at each event were put in writing...
...In response, the Reagan campaign asked the Carter forces to renounce this money...
...In press conferences and interviews, Clinton routinely refers to the DNC and its officers as "they" and "them...
...The Ickes documents also undermine another defense invoked by the president: namely, that the excesses of the Democrats' 1995-'96 fund-raising operation were somehow committed by a rogue Democratic National Committee...
...Its author is unknown, but the date it was faxed to Ickes is there on the sheet: April 28, 1994...
...It hangs there today...
...And in any case, nothing has happened in the Clinton White House that didn't happen during other presidencies...
...These excuses have elements of the scene in The Blues Brothers when John Belushi ticks off to Carrie Fisher the reasons why he never showed up at his own wedding ("My car had a flat tire...
...As early as 1993, reporters who had heard Clinton promise to end soft money when he ran for president asked a succession of White House press secretaries what Clinton was doing raising so much of it himself...
...So you're more likely to know if they want to do something than you are people who didn't help you...
...If this is so, McAuliffe came up with the more aggressive strategy six months before anybody even began to imagine that the Republicans would triumph in the midterm elections...
...In 1974, Congress outlawed corporate giving, placed strict limits on individual contributions, and said even the political parties couldn't accept more than $20,000 per person...
...But it seems more likely that the real date is January 5, 1994...
...The actual result of Clinton's victory in 1992 was that raising soft money became a perennial fixture of American politics...
...Down in Houston, George Bush released the entire list of those who had stayed overnight in the White House residence during his tenure...
...George M. Elsey, a young naval aide to both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, personally told Mrs...
...He edited DNC fund-raising appeals, and in his own handwriting he broached the notion of inviting $50,000 and $100,000 contributors to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom...
...George Christian, a press secretary to Lyndon John-son—and someone who actually lived in an upstairs bedroom on two occasions—said Johnson never talked about fund-raising and barely talked to officials at the DNC about anything...
...A former social secretary in the Kennedy administration recalled that Jackie Kennedy wouldn't let anyone sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom, ever, but that her husband overruled her—once—to let Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley and his wife sleep there...
...Using this logic, if the Bechtel Corporation gave $100,000 and then got anything it asked for, that would be fine too, since it does have the expertise to build anything anywhere in the world...
...The infamous Map Room "coffees" were described in writing as fund-raisers by both DNC and White House officials...
...Out in California, Nancy Reagan was even more steamed...
...The president was saying that if cross-dressing pro-basketball star Dennis Rodman gave $100,000 and then got his dream job of ambassador to France, that would be a quid pro quo...
...Okay, maybe the DNC shouldn't have escorted Chinese arms dealers into the Oval Office, but new procedures have been implemented to prevent that from happening in the future...
...Three weeks later at the Republican convention, Bush-campaign money man Robert Mosbacher convinced his boss that he could raise more money than Farmer using the same scheme...
...A bit of historical context is needed here...
...The White House counsel's office sought to minimize the legal problems both these transactions would seem to present (see story, page 12...
...But if Pamela Harri-man gave that sum (actually, she gave more) and then got the job, that would be just fine because she speaks the language...
...In the interim, we had learned that soft-money donors were granted such favors as seats on government planes during trade missions, $250-mil-lion no-bid housing contracts, and various shifts in administration policy (including one that would allow Guam to set up non-union sweatshops with imported foreign workers...
...Really, we're proud of what we did because it was necessary to save Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment...
...we had to act for the sake of the nation...
...When he was president of the White House Historical Association, Elsey actually presented to the Clintons the last wartime map commissioned by Roosevelt before he died...
...In the 1995-'96 cycle, the Democrats raised $122 million in soft money, while the Republicans raised $141 million...
...There was one more excuse yet to come, however, and in some ways it has proved the most diabolical of all...
...Together, the two campaigns raised more than $100 million in soft money...
...We do so, of course, because we are not yet used to the new year...
...After acknowledging that "some changes [are] in order," Clinton continued: "But I don't regret the fact that we worked like crazy to raise enough money to keep from being rolled over by the biggest juggernaut this country had seen in a very long time...
...From early in his administration, Clinton's obsession with soft money was no secret...
...There is a second document from a batch that had been in the files of deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes that outlines 10 perks big donors should get, such as rides on Air Force One and invitations to White House events...
...That's the way I felt about the trade missions...
...Farmer rationalized that this setup was legal because the checks would be made out to different Democratic party committees...
...AFL-CIO president John Sweeney pledged $35 million in ads for this purpose—a promise that apparently was kept...
...Thus, from the time the campaign-finance reforms were created, a pattern was set...
...The original post-Watergate campaign-finance reforms were confusing and subject to conflicting interpretations, but according to the Federal Election Commission they capped an individual's total donations to federal candidates, PACs, and national parties at $25,000...
...For this is the exact rationale employed by a previous president who got into trouble over campaign financing...
...The White House claims the correct date is January 5, 1995...
...The Democrats set out to ensure it would never happen again...
...But Gore then amended his story in a way that underscored the central reality of soft money—the fact that the DNC and the Clinton-Gore campaign were really one and the same...
...I can tell you categorically that there was no influence," Clinton said on November 8, 1996...
...Clinton was raising huge amounts of soft money from the first year he was president...
...Finally, we'll be more careful...
...There is a problem with this explanation, though: It is perilously close to saying that the ends justify the means...
...Originally, the vice president had told reporters that he'd made the calls on a DNC credit card...
...Then in 1976, at a time when both parties were planning to construct party-headquarters buildings in Washington, Congress removed the limits for "Building Funds...
...The actual party buildings have long since been built and occupied, but the $20,000 limit on donations to national parties was never honored again...
...In the 1980 campaign, labor announced it was going to spend some $4 million to work to reelect Jimmy Carter...
...The same week, it was revealed that Margaret A. Williams, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, had personally accepted a $50,000 donation from businessman Johnny Chung while on White House property...
...At least at first...
...Isn't it more plausible that McAuliffe (or his secretary) simply forgot that the calendar year had changed from 1993...
...In 1988, DNC fund-raiser Robert Farmer announced the formation of "Victory Fund '88," an effort to identify and dun wealthy Democratic donors to the tune of $100,000 apiece...
...Though the group's president, Fred Wertheimer, is no one's idea of a conservative, he actually led a demonstration outside a Clinton soft-money fund-raiser on June 22 that year...
...A couple of times he has mentioned "that other campaign," ignoring the fact that under DNC bylaws he is not only the titular head of the organization but the person who selects its leaders...
...The loophole was soft money...
...In 1987, even this rule was broken when McDonald's heiress Joan Kroc gave a cool $1 million to the DNC, exactly $975,000 above the sum allowed by law...
...This points to an interesting question: If Clinton is being honest when he says he needed soft money in the wake of the 1994 debacle, then why did he and the Democrats raise almost as much in 1994 as in 1995...
...Such contributions were then legal, but the public recoiled from the notion that one rich person could exert that kind of influence on a national election...
...Later he resigned his post in disgust, his dreams of banning soft money dashed by the party he thought was on his side...
...First, let's examine the fund-raising figures Clinton keeps talking about...
...This is a novel defense...
...In June 1994, the liberal watchdog group Common Cause put out a report complaining about it...
...Never mind that the relevant statute was written before the invention of the telephone...
...The two-year total for the Republicans: $31.7 million...
...He, too, thought the results of the election in question were so important for the future of the country that he was permitted to take shortcuts...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 29
