THE CABINET CLINTON DESERVES

...But were the sums really so small...

...That much of the story is undisputed...

...He's a type familiar to anyone who's ever had to do business with a small-town city hall...

...Eckstein's clients were losing the bureaucratic contest, and he came to plead for a little more time to make his case...

...Eckstein and Babbitt were old friends, and Eckstein wanted a favor...

...An independent counsel was named in May, and the investigation has only just begun—which means it may be months before Geraldo gets a chance to explain: If you take kickbacks from a foreign businessman, of course you're going to lie about it...

...But Espy...

...No presiDavid Frum, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author of What's Right: The New Conservative Majority and the Remaking of America...

...Weaver had bought Herman's diversity-consulting business when Herman joined the Clinton administration, and between 1994 and 1996 Weaver visited Herman at the White House some two dozen times, often in the company of her clients...

...The new quotas are the basis of a multi-billion dollar private-sector regime...

...That's Elaine Kamarck, a former Gore staffer now decamped to Harvard, as quoted in the New Republic last week, and hers is a line we are very likely to hear repeated more and more as the congressional elections draw closer...

...She did especially well out of real estate, getting a slice of the action in downtown-Washington developments—including the Ronald Reagan Building—from developers who understood that taking care of friends of Jesse Jackson could speed approval by Marion Barry's city hall...

...But those who have unashamedly milked it are precisely the minority Americans who have ascended to the top of the Democratic party...

...The racial quotas by which a cabinet is filled are just the tip of a vast network of racial quotas that pervade American society...

...But whatever his character before he entered the Clinton administration, he has been spattered by the same moral sludge that has stained so many of his colleagues...

...Did any of them give him money for her too...

...Jackson's group was in those days arm-twisting corporations into agreeing to quotas for minority contractors—and after Herman left government, it was her firm that Jackson urged companies to hire to monitor the quotas...

...This regime necessarily corrupts those who make their careers in it...

...She has been indicted herself for tampering with evidence...

...But he's also a type that is very rarely present in federal cabinets...

...So how did he get his job...

...Clinton might triangulate himself away from the unions, the gays, the welfare mothers, and the ACLU, but he never would, and never could, triangulate himself away from the racial spoils system...

...But the race and sex quotas on which the Clinton administration has been built, and especially the race quotas, are crucially different from the old rules mandating a certain number of southerners or Catholics or union members...

...Most minority Americans keep their distance from it—some are disgusted by it...

...Not a party problem...

...The old rules only governed public appointments...

...It took attorney general Janet Reno a year to decide that an independent counsel should look into Yene's accusations...

...In July 1995, a lobbyist named Paul Eckstein came to see Babbitt...

...But unanswered questions swirl about his case, of which the most important is, Where did the $250,000 come from...

...Other benefactors made generous and sometimes illegal donations, totaling tens of thousands of dollars, to Espy's brother's congressional campaign...

...It's a sign of how very troubled an organization the Democratic party is that it professes not to notice or care that Bill Clinton's "most ethical administration in the history of the Republic" has ended in a cabinet of perps...

...Herman arranged the bulk of the "it's only coffee" White House fundraisers...

...Sometimes a president must wince and appoint a key political fixer or an important party boss to high office—the way FDR appointed James Farley postmaster general or George Bush made James Baker secretary of state...

...The application was opposed by neighboring Indian tribes who feared it would cut into betting at their dog track...

...Cisneros succeeded in patching up his marriage after the scandal...

...That's not to say every cabinet officer is a George Shultz or a Joe Califano...

...After Cisneros returned to his wife, he began making cash payments to Medlar—payments that totaled over $250,000 between 1989 and 1994...

...Just as bad things happen to good people, the theory seems to go, so even the nicest parties can find themselves under the leadership of perjurers and sexual predators...

...Cisneros was not a rich man, and while he seems to have earned a comfortable living in his four years in the private sector, he had two college-age daughters and a sick son to support...

...What the public needs to understand is that the context is an administration entirely shot through with misconduct and deceit...

...Tax chiseling is a serious crime...

...It is that—not Clinton's cigar—that is the moral scandal of the modern Democratic party...

...But there's a problem with this exculpatory reasoning...

...The affair became public the next year, and Cis-neros retired from politics...

...Open...

...As an official in the Labor Department between 1977 and 1981, she steered millions of dollars of grants to groups like Jesse Jackson's PUSH...

...It is the party's reason for being...

...The president's defenders often urge us to see his infractions in context...

...Jay Leno once joked that it was typical of Clinton to divert attention from a scandal with another scandal...

...There was no reason to give him any senior job at all...

...But whatever its direct effect, a steady flow of free-bies to a department head gives license to subordinates to expect baksheesh for themselves: Espy's chief of staff, fellow Mississippian Ron Blackley, improperly took $22,000 in consulting fees from agri-businesses after going to work at the department...

...And this is all the deadlier because the racial spoils system that elevated Herman and Espy and Cisneros to the cabi- net is not some rotten but fundamentally minor aspect of modern Democratic politics...

...Espy's defenders argue that the very smallness of the sums at stake proves his innocence: You can't buy a cabinet secretary with free tickets to the U.S...

...Similarly, any administration can see one cabinet officer enmeshed in scandal—but four...

...One of Espy's benefactors, a firm that lobbied his department, provided Dempsey, who is the mother of his children, with a job...

...The Babbitt case illustrates how even a man with a reputation for decency could be mired by the Democratic party's lawless fund-raising practices in 1996...

...To conceal the gifts, Espy, it's alleged, had to fill out financial-disclosure forms falsely, alter travel records, and then tell face-to-face lies to investigators, including the FBI...

...Ignore me, and you'll be picketed by Jesse Jackson...

...In December 1997, Cisneros was indicted...

...And when she is raised to the cabinet, she brings the habits and practices nurtured by this system to the very center of American government...

...Behind the Lewinsky matter, behind the illegal campaign contributions from the Chinese military and other mysterious foreign sources, behind the firing of the travel-office employees, Whitewater, Mrs...

...Babbitt refused and explained that White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes was demanding that the final decision against the casino be made right away...

...Espy is also charged with making deceptive statements so that the government would pay the cost of a leased Jeep Cherokee for his personal use back home in Mississippi...

...In March of this year, an independent counsel was named to investigate whether Babbitt lied to Congress...

...The FBI wasn't asking about the size of his payments to Medlar out of prurience: There's a federal tax due on gifts of more than $10,000 per year, and there's no record of Cisneros's ever having paid it...

...The letter Reno filed with the court that named the counsel was written so as to lead the casual reader to think the accusations were proba- bly false...

...If he did, he still has the inevitable excuse: If you're selling Interior Department decisions to the highest bidder at the White House's behest, of course you have to lie about it...

...She is exactly what you get—what you ought to expect to get— from a system of minority set-asides and quotas in contracting...

...Medlar had more trouble: She divorced and was unable to find work to support herself and her daughter...

...In 1994, Yene had gone into business with—and set up housekeep- ing with—a good friend of Herman's named Vanessa Weaver...

...He told them that he had paid her no more than $10,000 a year...

...It is an industry that benefits only a relative handful of minority Americans in any substantial way...

...Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy On October 1, Mike Espy became the first cabinet officer to go to trial for corruption in office since Teapot Dome...

...Before the Thompson committee, Babbitt pleaded the Steiner defense: Yes, he had invoked Ickes's name—but only to hustle Eckstein out of his office...

...a type abundantly represented in both political parties...

...Her career has been at bottom one long protection racket: Cut me into your real-estate deal, and you'll avoid all sorts of nasty accusations...

...Why was Mike Espy in the cabinet at all...

...He got it the same way that Janet Reno got hers...

...He had never been pressured by Ickes, his decision was the right one, and, no, it had nothing to do with the money—which in fact amounted to $350,000—that the casino's opponents had given to the Clinton-Gore campaign...

...Lying to the FBI is a serious crime, too—although when Cisneros comes to trial, we can expect to be told: If you're cheating on your taxes and paying blackmail with money that comes from who-knows-where, of course you're going to lie about it...

...If the administration's difficulties were simply the product of Clinton's personal failings, the scandals would implicate nobody except the president and his staff...

...In a year and a half as secretary of agriculture, Espy is alleged to have accepted tens of thousands of dollars' worth of gifts from corporations regulated and subsidized by his department: tickets to sporting events (including the 1994 Super Bowl), air tickets, limousine rides, meals, and luggage...

...Donald Smalz, the independent counsel in the Espy case, has been unable to prove that any particular gift bought any identifiable favor from Espy, although there are some suggestive coincidences, notably the decision not to enforce tighter meat-safety standards against the chicken industry—an industry dominated by Tyson Foods, which treated Espy with special generosity...

...The essence of that system is special favors justified in the language of equal rights, and because the reality of the system is so starkly different from the disguise it travels under, the system habituates all those who live by it to never-ending lying...

...As Geraldo Rivera might say, if you take illegal gratuities, of course you have to lie about them...

...Herman's private-sector career over the next dozen years was lucrative...

...Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman Questions have been raised about Alexis Herman's ethics ever since she served in the Carter administration...

...Not a party problem...

...Cisneros has by and large received very sympathetic media treatment, in part because Medlar is an unappealing character...

...He also charges that Herman pushed Weaver to ask clients to make donations to the 1996 Clinton campaign...

...And the Espy and Herman cases illustrate something more troubling still: the way that affirmative action has systematically corrupted the Democratic party...

...According to Eckstein, however, Babbitt went on to say, "'Do you know how much these Indians,'" meaning the Indians opposed to Eckstein's clients' request, "'have given to Democrats?' I said, 'I don't have the slightest idea.' And he said, 'Half a million dollars.'" In October 1997, Babbitt was called before the Senate to respond to Eckstein...

...In 1994, Medlar exposed the story, and an independent counsel was appointed...

...And although the Democratic congressional caucus has enthusiastically dedicated itself to impeding and obstructing every investigation into the president's misconduct, and although pro-administration talking heads are still blasting Ken Starr for uncovering the truth about the president, and although the party's so-called wise men are now denying that perjury is an impeachable offense, we are still supposed to believe that Clinton is an aberration whose offenses in no way reflect on the moral character of the party that twice nominated him and still seeks to protect him...

...Well, that depends how one defines "problem...

...As a reward for a job well done, she succeeded Robert Reich as labor secretary in 1997...

...One of Oscar Wilde's characters quipped of an orphan, "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune...

...Remember Josh Steiner, the twenty-something administration aide who explained that he had lied to his diary...

...President Clinton's choice of Ron Brown for secretary of commerce followed this ancient tradition...

...It's just one of life's little unpredictable misfortunes...

...If so, did those gifts cease when Cisneros entered the Clinton administration...

...Clinton's strange cash windfall and her contradictory explanations of it—is a still deeper scandal...

...Not a party problem...

...In 1993, Cisneros got the tap to join the Clinton cabinet and was asked by the FBI about his relationship with Medlar...

...Cisneros and Medlar started their affair in 1987, when he was mayor of San Antonio and she was a campaign aide...

...A protégé of Ron Brown's, Herman went to work in the Clinton administration, where her main duty seemed to be fund-raising for the 1996 Clinton campaign...

...dent has ever had as many of his cabinet officers on the wrong side of the law as Bill Clinton—not Grant, not Harding, not Truman, not even Nixon...

...The independent counsel's indictment notes that Cisneros's political supporters offered to provide Medlar with a job...

...Or, as we say in the age of Clinton, how one defines "party," "not," and "a" as well...

...Eckstein represented an Indian tribe that was trying to open a casino in Wisconsin...

...The Cisneros case illustrates the readiness of the Clintonites to try to protect themselves from ordinary embarrassment by lying and deceit...

...Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt Former Arizona governor and presidential candidate Bruce Babbitt has the sort of reputation for political integrity you get if you are an environmentalist liberal who makes self-depreciating jokes: a Mo Udall for the '90s...

...HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros Former housing and urban development secretary Henry Cisneros also goes to trial this fall on charges of lying to the FBI about payments to a former mistress, Linda Medlar...

...And what about Cisneros's tax liability...

...Quotas are hardly new things in American politics...

...His girlfriend, Patricia Dempsey, was allegedly given thousands of dollars in cash by corporations that did business with his department...

...But it conceded, almost ruefully, that where Justice Department lawyers had checked, Yene's factual claims had been corroborated...

...to lose both looks like carelessness...

...He had lied to Eckstein...

...That's the real story of Alexis Herman...

...Here's a petty operator, scrounging for a job for his girlfriend and free football tickets for himself...

...Nor are small gifts necessarily less corrupting than big ones...

...Instead, not only is the president in danger of impeachment, but four of his cabinet officers face charges of corruption and perjury remarkably similar to those in which Clinton himself is mired...

...Yene charges that Weaver and he had an understanding with Herman that they would pay Herman 10 percent of any business she helped to generate...

...Yes, he was the victim of blackmail...

...Black-ley was convicted of perjury last December...

...But take a second look...

...Almost immediately, an African businessman named Laurent Yene stepped forward to accuse Herman of demanding kickbacks from him...