A Sorry President
A Sorry President Officially, at least, the White House line remains that President Clinton's August 17 mea-sorta-culpa speech achieved a thoroughgoing catharsis on the Monica Lewinsky matter— both...
...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...
...Or worse...
...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...
...On September 1, Senate Democrats held their first weekly luncheon of the fall congressional session...
...What to do...
...Basically," however, Clinton doesn't agree with Lieberman at all, and he isn't very sorry, either...
...McHale's candor in terms of the medals he won in the armed forces of the United States...
...We want that, too...
...Monica who...
...Consider, for instance, the new administration-approved version of its job-search efforts on Monica Lewinsky's behalf...
...Basically," the president fibbed, "I agree with what [Lieber-man] said...
...The president's intended work schedule is already taking shape...
...Be "very careful," Roger warned...
...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...
...Lieberman says his "feelings of disappointment and anger" with the president "have not dissipated" over time...
...It should quickly make available to other members of Congress and the public as much information as possible...
...A Sorry President Officially, at least, the White House line remains that President Clinton's August 17 mea-sorta-culpa speech achieved a thoroughgoing catharsis on the Monica Lewinsky matter— both for him personally and for all America...
...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...
...So do we...
...For, really, after all: Our president's fitness for office is in serious doubt...
...Trouble is, few other politicians travel so imper-turbably from fiction to fiction as William Jefferson Clinton...
...Clinton's Lewinsky affair, Lieberman insisted, is not a mildly "inappropriate" and safely "private" misadventure...
...This "controversy," it soon turned out, was imaginary...
...Nor is it possible, Lieberman went on, for the nation simply "to move on and get this matter behind us...
...The key question, though, is precisely when this inquiry will begin in earnest...
...In this respect, let's face it, he is an unusual man...
...There will be, above all, a smear campaign against the president's current and potential critics...
...Then, almost immediately, word began circulating through Washington that Clinton allies were aiding and abetting a forthcoming Vanity Fair story on Rep...
...I have a very good idea who it is...
...In the middle of this sheet, in big, block letters emphasized by stabbing arrows, appeared three words: "WE ARE DOOMED...
...This magazine has already expressed its judgment that Clinton's conduct falls beneath the de minimus standards of the presidency...
...Lieberman was right to insist on "public rebuke and accountability" for the president's behavior in the Lewinsky scandal...
...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...
...The people's business, minority leader Tom Daschle gamely told reporters when he finally emerged, ducking the Monica question and feigning optimism...
...This is exculpatory...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...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...
...it is "disgraceful" and "immoral," and the president's bad example has "profound public consequences...
...And in the second such interview, Scott's lawyer has told the Washington Post, Lewinsky bitterly complained about her banishment to the Pentagon...
...Neither party, assuming the Starr report is delivered in the next couple of weeks, is instinctively eager to get underway...
...Fair enough—with one important proviso...
...But this is what cannot be allowed to happen...
...There is no more important question that today confronts the Congress—and the American people...
...The House Judiciary Committee should begin its deliberations immediately...
...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...
...Paul McHale, for his part, thinks he knows who's running this disgusting operation...
...Clinton, it turns out, was involved from the start...
...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...
...All the others who had affairs with the president...
...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...
...The meeting, ostensibly devoted to the party's "substantive policy agenda," seems actually to have been absorbed entirely with strategizing over the Lewinsky fiasco...
...But back in the lunch room, a page of scribbled notes left behind by one careless Democratic senator revealed the only true mood...
...But hardly anyone else is safe from White House slime...
...By January, even a devastating report from the independent counsel may well seem both old and dull, and therefore not worth acting on...
...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...
...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...
...Never mind...
...That basic lie has now been exploded—by the president himself—and the explosion obviously does not feel like cathartic release...
...Which, in fact, he hadn't previously said...
...Just as if nothing had happened...
...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...
...No, it just plain hurts...
...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 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...
...Yuck...
...I never had an affair with the president," she said, "but all the others who have get to stay...
...Even so, interesting details continually emerge...
...Early last year, he asked deputy personnel chief Marsha Scott to interview Lewinsky for a possible return assignment at the White House...
...Dan Burton's sex life...
...I suspect this individual is a nationally known figure very close to the president," he says...
...In the short term, it appears, the White House will fight this battle by time-tested Clintonian means...
...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...
...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...
...When the Starr report finally appears, the waiting period should end at once...
...Lieberman, of course, is a man of cautious and moderate temperament, so he is presumably beyond reproach...
...America has shown a quite shocking capacity to dull itself to "old news" about Bill Clinton...
...The leaks involve highly selective accounts of various incriminating sequences of events...
...The man who called our reporter acquaintance was Sidney Blumenthal...
...Next week, he will kick off a nationwide swing of bigdollar DNC fund-raisers...
...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...
...He has been "quite heartened by the reaction," Clinton surre-ally 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...
...Democrats want to conduct their fall campaigns with as little Lewinsky static as possible...
...Navy Times has never reported any such thing...
...This, too, proved false...
...That paper has since editorially condemned Rivera as "dishonest...
...Not sorry enough to accept a congressional resolution of reprimand or censure, for example, the minimum "public rebuke" Lieberman seems to consider appropriate...
...And the explanations so far offered for these events— by unnamed "Clinton advisers"—strain credulity...
...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...
...This difficult work will take time, and the committee should have such time as it needs...
...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...
...The following day, the White House-friendly Internet tabloid Salon posted a farrago of sexual innuendoes about Newt Gingrich on its Web site...
Vol. 4 • September 1998 • No. 1
