THE TRIUMPH OF CLINTONISM

...Republicans have made removing the president from office their top priority...

...All they asked in return was that the voters overlook the multiple perjuries and other crimes of the party leader, and vote for one of his local henchmen...

...The losers will now take part in the ritualized debate over whether they lost because they went too far or because they didn't go far enough...

...And the American public took the POLITICS IS OF COURSE ABOUT DEALS...

...In every election there is one big question to think about," began a television ad over black-and-white footage of voters lining up at an old-fashioned booth...

...Should we reward not telling the truth...

...Throughout 1998, the Republican leadership in Congress ducked and squirmed and prayed— both silently and out loud—that the scandal would somehow go away on its own, perhaps through a quick and tidy presidential resignation in the wake of the Starr report, perhaps through one of the apology-censure deals broached by Sen...

...Congress had only two options before it: either permit Bill Clinton to make himself the first chief executive in the republic's history to brazenly violate the laws protecting the integrity of judicial proceedings in the full light of day or apply the constitutionally prescribed remedy to a man presiding over a stock market that roared upward nearly 1,000 points in the month before Election Day...

...Clinton gained the Democratic nomination by promising to free the party from its thralldom to the values of Barney Frank, Jesse Jackson, and Patricia Ireland...

...A reliably liberal federal judiciary is reliable no more...

...deal—or at any rate enough of them did to break with the ancient sixth-year curse (according to which the president's party loses congressional seats during his second term...

...It could be said that the Democrats really had no choice...

...They called on the public to punish Clinton—without ever explaining in their ads why punishment was called for...

...It was not the congressional Republicans but the media—unable to stomach an endless diet of lies from the president and the White House—that drove this scandal, and it was conservative activists and not the local Republican parties who responded to it...

...The Democratic monopoly on Congress has yielded to a new reality in which Republicans are competitive in the House and dominant in the Senate...

...So long as they had that, they remained—despite all their other losses—the party in power, with all that that implies for their ability to deliver favors to their friends and raise money in return...

...But of course, you don't balance somebody you intend to remove from office...

...Yes, even this...

...Republicans are used to this kind of adversity: They suffered it in 1992-94, in 1974-80, and before that in 1960-68...

...So they chose to try to finesse them, just as they tried to finesse the budget...

...it used to be the party of moral outrage over men who "just don't get it"—men like the senator who put the moves on women who worked for him or the Supreme Court nominee who was accused of talking dirty...

...It describes a style of politics, a style characterized by slavish poll-reading and shameless lying...

...It is extremely unlikely that we will hear very much more about it from the leaders of the Republican party...

...Despite the Democrats' good day on Tuesday, the party remains a deeply, deeply troubled institution...

...Even the support of the national media, which for decades pampered the Democratic party, can no longer be taken for granted...

...But the Republicans, too, have been tarnished by the campaign they have just finished...

...Until the very last week of the campaign, national Republican ads made scant reference to the Lewinsky scandal, and all but a handful of individual campaigns shunned it altogether...

...Republican congressmen are human, after all, and they very understandably wanted to be spared the embarrassment of talking about so squalid a scandal on national television...

...The Republican strategy yielded abject failure...

...Alas, this complaint is mistaken...

...Throughout the campaign, the Democratic party made clear that a vote for them was a vote to let the president off scot-free...

...It's time to get rid of those Republicans...

...Orrin Hatch or Gerald Ford...

...And in fact, in the election's aftermath, it has ceased to be convenient...

...Clin-tonism is a disease, not a belief...

...They knew, too, that if Clinton were forced out, it was extremely unlikely that Gore could survive the wreck...

...it was presented to Congress as a result of a legal mechanism, the independent counsel, that the president demanded...

...The desire to win will cause people to do all sorts of strange things...

...For the Democrats, it's worth remembering—funny though it seems now—that the great accomplishment of Bill Clinton in 1992 was to free them both from the Acid-Amnesty-Abortion legacy of George McGovern and the sniffish superiority of Adlai Stevenson and Eugene McCarthy...

...Certainly they had a choice over whether to go to the country with a record of legislative achievement...

...A broken, shriveled, financially distressed party...

...They are obsessed with getting rid of the president...

...The ritualized condemnations of the president's "inappropriate" behavior that congressional Democrats unhappily summoned up in August were nowhere to be heard in October...

...The Democrats entered this election cycle with really only one last big asset: the White House...

...They nailed their colors to the mast...

...In the very short run, the Republicans' decision has brought the party only grief, and the Democrats have won a triumph...

...If the mission of the 106th Congress was to "balance" Clinton, that clearly implied that Clinton would still be sitting on his end of the teeter-totter as long as Congress sat on its...

...The president and the Democrats achieved this notwithstanding a Republican ad campaign intended to reassure voters that they too meant Clinton no real harm...

...The last round of Democratic national television ads put the message even more bluntly...

...Without the White House, what would the Democrats of 2000 be...

...Republicans are the balance we need," spot after spot concluded...

...But this...

...But that all went poof in the past campaign...

...And they were therefore prepared to pay almost any price to avoid that fate: even as high a price as defending without a visible flicker of conscience a per-jurious president, his indicted cabinet officers, and his absconded Chinese financial backers...

...Clintonism believes that law and justice are about deals, too...

...or perhaps (like Senate majority leader Trent Lott) they will repeat post-election the Democratic pre-election spin that the '98 results were the product of hundreds of local races rather than one big national campaign...

...There seems to be a mood about Washington this week that Congress can have proof of presidential criminality shoved under its nose and look away if the stock market is rising...

...If it does so, the Lewinsky matter will indeed recede into history...

...Yeah," replies a second female voice...

...There is one way to stop this...

...All that has now gone with the wind...

...they will argue (as Newt Gingrich has) that the media are willfully ignoring the big news of a third consecutive Republican House majority...

...All Republicans talk about are investigations," an actress complained in one radio spot...

...Vote Democratic and tell Congress we're ready to move on...

...Yet the evidence of Clinton's crimes was not gathered by Congress...

...But what about the Republicans...

...It was a very striking sign of how sick they were of the business that they could watch the president of the United States effectively negotiate in public for almost a month with indicted tax evader Abe Hirschfeld for a $1 million personal gratuity to Paula Jones to help Clinton wriggle out of his legal troubles, without even a squeak of congressional protest...

...a party that an ordinary person could belong to without shame...

...the Congress is now almost certain to let him off the hook...

...Against a background of the Capitol dome, the ads intoned, "This is no ordinary time...

...Its unrivaled grip on state leg-islatures—a basic fact of American politics a generation ago—has been broken...

...They knew that if Clinton could keep the cops at bay, he just might be able to pass on the presidency to Al Gore in 2000, saving the party from banishment to the margins of American life...

...the Democrats' succeeded...

...But before that debate begins, it's worth pausing to consider how it is that the Democrats and Republicans came to enter the 1998 campaign with the Monica positions they held...

...As recently as August, Joseph Lieberman gave the old act one last grand performance on the floor of the Senate, denouncing the president's "immorality...

...they warned that Democrats would try to shut down their investigations—while emitting their own pitiful whimpers of eagerness to be rid of the whole mess...

...About the Monica matter, however, they too had a path before them that left them little choice...

...They will point to the exit polls showing that voters still disapprove of his character...

...The idea that the Republicans were a party of sex-crazed investigators—an idea we'll be hearing a lot of over the next few days—is almost delusional in its revisionism...

...So the fight over Clinton was a fight for the survival of the Democratic party as something like an equal force in American politics—and fights like that are waged without scruple or restraint...

...But the Democrats had known nothing like it for decades, and the prospect of it must have seemed not only terrifying but outrageous to them...

...At this writing, the Democratic ads are still posted at the party's Web site, www.democrats.org...

...The party of Archibald Cox and Anthony Lewis, of the furrowed brow and the excruciating constitutional scruple, suddenly morphed into the party of Johnnie Cochran: If Starr's a twit, you must acquit...

...CLINTONISM HOLDS THAT LAW AND JUSTICE ARE ABOUT DEALS, TOO...

...But the bridge to the twenty-first century that the president keeps promising will be built at the end of a very crooked road...

...This year, it's, Should we reward Bill Clinton...

...A few weeks ago, an article in a liberal magazine complained that there is as yet no such thing as a philosophy of "Clinton-ism," in the sense that there is such a thing as "Rea-ganism" or "Jeffersonianism...

...The faculty radicals, Hollywood artistes, and New Yorker contributors that Bill Clinton locked in the party basement six years ago have now been set free, to take to the airwaves and the glossy magazines to denounce the idea that anyone might ever be permitted to make a moral judgment about anything except smoking...

...Those governors who aren't Republicans do their very best to sound as if they are...

...Whatever one thinks of Kenneth Starr, the Republican congressional party looked on the Lewinsky scandal with about as much appetite as a French parliamentary delegation encountering its first dish of Senate bean soup...

...The Democrats offered the voters the promise of 100,000 new unionized public-school teachers and the abolition of the laws of arithmetic insofar as they apply to Social Security...

...Only at the end did the Republicans raise the matter, and then in the most gingerly way...

...Unfortunately, Republicans are no more immune to it than Democrats...

...There is indeed such a thing as Clinton-ism—it just doesn't happen to be a philosophy...

...But over the longer term, it's not clear that either party will really benefit from the results of 1998...

...now, in order to excuse the boss's vices, the party is more deeply committed to those values than ever...

...Reward Bill Clinton or vote Republican...

...No Republican ad mentioned the impeachment inquiry voted in the past session of Congress, although plenty found time to mention the apparently much more noteworthy micro-regulations in the Republican version of the Patient Bill of Rights...

...Politics, of course, is about deals...

...It describes too a mode of governing characterized by the ducking of responsibility and the prostitution of the powers of the state to the shabbiest sort of personal advantage...

...It is quite incredible, at least for those with a sense of history, that the Democrats decided to fight the election as rank apologists for the president...

...They chose not to pass a tax cut, chose not to seize on the president's State of the Union plea to save Social Security as an invitation to go to work on a personal-retirement-account system, chose finally to bust the budget in the closing weeks of Congress...

...In attempting to wring political advantage from the Lewinsky scandal—in attempting to use it to enlarge their congressional majority while simultaneously failing to argue its real seriousness—the Republicans convinced the public that the matter was for them nothing more than a partisan device, which would be turned off as soon as it ceased to be convenient...

...This used to be, after all, the party that was always viewing-with-alarm the specter of presidential lawlessness...

...These were, Republican leaders apparently felt, two bad options...

...Clinton brilliantly repackaged the Democrats as a party that honored work, faith, responsibility, and family...

...Some happy-talk Republicans will want of course to deny the magnitude of the president's victory...

...Well, phooey...

...They were human, too, in being sensitive to the likelihood that the famously vindictive Clinton White House would pry into the personal lives of its opponents to convince the public that the president should be excused because, after all, "everybody does it...

...And all the ads that did touch on the scandal were careful to make plain the Republican belief that an enlarged Republican majority would in itself constitute full and sufficient punishment for the president...

...The president has confessed to crimes...