Striking the match
to Mr. Starr's
powder
"The Close Calls of Our Lives," the enduring soap opera
detailing the adventures of Bill and Hillary Clinton,
continues.
Webb Hubbell, the genial giant who may know Victoria's
secrets, is sprung for the moment, though fat guys who escape
through holes in the fence eventually find a fence they're too fat
to wriggle through.
The stakes are even larger for Bill and Hillary. They can't
always count on grateful judges like Henry Woods and James
Robertson. Ken Starr loses again in the court of media
obsession, but, alas for the Arkansas traveler, that's not the
court he'll eventually have to please.
Judge Robertson, writing as if a fugitive from James
Carville's spin team, used his order dismissing charges against
Hubbell as an occasion for gratuitous asides, warning Mr. Starr
that he had outrun his writ. Henry Woods, the infamous fixer
and federal judge in Little Rock, tried this in the Jim Guy
Tucker case and the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals handed
him his head and his rear end on a platter, and bounced him off
the case. Judge Robertson may yet have to find another way to
thank Bill Clinton for his job.
In the wake of Judge Robertson's save, some pundits and
other bloviators, including Mortuary Bob Woodward and the
usual television airheads, are writing off Mr. Starr and his men
as the gang that can't shoot straight, and it's true that Mr.
Starr's feet have been well ventilated by shots from his own
pea-shooter. But you may have noticed that most of the
pundits and airheads writing him off are the same bloviators
who said Mr. Clinton would be gone in a week after the first
revelation of Monica Lewinsky's tales of passion and rapture
(or at least happy glands) on the Oval Office rug.
Hubbell may yet go back to prison, though it's difficult even
for the growing army of Clinton detractors to root for the
Internal Revenue Service. If Hubbell is pursued by the IRS, he
can't be all bad. He seems surprised by his good fortune, as if
expecting the worst to continue, and was as defiant as ever.
There's something in the Southern genes -- no doubt inherited if
only by osmosis from the Confederate soldier -- that makes a
man resist as long as he can see his enemy through the blood
over his eyes, and then to fight on blindly long after anyone
remembers what started the fight.
Through the efforts of a few of Mr. Clinton's friends,
Hubbell was well paid (a half-million dollars) for his silence
--omerta, it was called by the frequent mob visitors to the Hot
Springs of yesteryear -- but a man with Mr. Clinton's sense of
personal loyalty can never be sure how long bought friendships
last.
The president, who has always found other men to fall on
their swords for him (while he practices swordplay elsewhere),
seemed relieved when Bruce Lindsey woke him up in China
with the news.
"This decision speaks for itself," Mr. Clinton said from
Guilin, where he was seeing the sights with his wife, daughter
and mother-in-law, "and I am pleased for Webb and Suzy."
The continuing Clinton coziness with the Hubbells is curious,
given that to the Clintons, friends are just Kleenex, to discard
after use, and given that Hubbell admits stealing hundreds of
thousands of dollars from Hillary and her partners at the Rose
Law Firm. The first lady, who once took a 25-cent tax
deduction for what we can well imagine were well-soiled
presidential BVDs, is not usually so sanguine about someone
trifling with her pocketbook. A cynical man might conclude that
Hubbell knows something the Clintons don't want Mr. Starr to
find out.
The string of "defeats" suffered by Mr. Starr, beginning with
losing his argument for waiver of lawyer-client privilege to
obtain the Vince Foster notes and the springing of Susan
McDougal, are not important except to the pontificators who
have found sinecures on obscure cable-TV channels. They're
writing off the Starr investigation this week. A fortnight ago, the
Starr stock was up, the Clinton down. That's the way it'll spin
spin a fortnight from now.
But it's all sound and fury, signifying not very much. Only
Ken Starr knows what he's got, and how long he'll take doing
something with it. Mr. Clinton, a lawyer himself, understands
how lawyers who get a client who pays on time are trained to
drag out the litigation until they pick the client's last pocket.
From the president's perspective, Ken Starr is beginning to
look a lot like George Bush late in the '92 campaign. Everyone
knew George Bush, decent to a fault, had the powder to blow
Bill Clinton back to Hot Springs, but he never would put the
match to it. Everyone knows Mr. Starr has the powder, and he
has kept it exceedingly dry. Does he have the match? And can
a Republican screw up the courage to strike it?
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