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A.J. and others, I have pasted the editorial in today's WSJ. They seem to hit nail on the head everyday when it comes to assessing Clinton and the Democrats:
WSJ Editorial
CLINTON'S SUPPORTERS
In the next day or so, it was announced yesterday, Bill Clinton is going to give a major speech in favor of, and outlining his proposals for, campaign finance reform. There surely are many metaphors we could compose around such an apparition taking place in the midst of this week's revelations about the amazing world of John Huang, but by now the Clinton Presidency is beyond comparison. After four nonstop years of this, Bill Clinton floats in a realm of the brazen never before witnessed in this country's political history. And the Democratic Party and its high-minded intellectual apparatus swallow it with scarcely a gulp.
Given the stakes at this particular juncture in electoral history, it's understandable that significant Democratic defections from this Presidency were never in the offing. Should Mr. Clinton lose, and the Republicans hold Congress, the Democratic Party likely would enter the wilderness for a generation. So perhaps we should be content with the few honorable exceptions drawing a line at scandal--longtime Democratic consultant Ted Van Dyk and former Watergate counsel Jerome Zeifman published on this page, and perhaps a few others. We have to note, however, that not one major figure in the Democratic Party, none, has separated himself or herself from the squalor of this Presidency. The party elders and liberal spokesmen in the press choose instead to lash themselves to the mast, at least through Nov. 5.
So we now have Senator Chris Dodd obliged to step forward and personally man the bilge pumps while the John Huang scandal pours forth in the final week of the campaign. Documents pried out of the Commerce Department this week show that Mr. Huang, described by party spokesmen as a mid-level nobody, had phone messages left for him at Commerce by an amazing array of key Clinton cronies: Hollywood pal Harry Thomason, who tried to capture the White House Travel office; Denver lawyer James Lyons, whose report drove the press off Whitewater during the '92 campaign; Arkansas-in-Asia rainmaker Mark Middleton; Mack McLarty; Bruce Lindsey and even Harold Ickes. Mr. Huang by his own account Tuesday met at the White House with the President "quite a few times . . . many times."
Again, we want to make a distinction between traditional politics and this Presidency. No one in politics would blanch at senior Democrats defending any one or two of the Clinton scandals and outrages as they arose. Politicians aren't holy men and stuff happens. But if you roll the tape back to Bill Clinton's entrance on the national political scene in the '92 campaigns, one sees the first signs in the bizarre equivocations of "didn't inhale" and the draft-board mumbo-jumbo. Something here was uniquely amiss.
He won. But what was foretold in those odd early episodes reappeared. The Travelgate episode and the ensuing White House stonewalling was passed off by defenders as "inexplicably ham-handed." Somehow the "inexplicable" continued unabated--the equivocal excuses, the ideological sellouts and buybacks, the stonewalling (I can't recollect, my memory is impaired, I lied to my diary), the flouted subpoenas from Congress and the courts, and the debauched procedures of the FBI, Secret Service and IRS ("honest bureaucratic mistakes")--with the campaign's final week now spent mocking the campaign reporting rules and defying a federal judge.
But for all those Democrats who served long before Bill Clinton arrived and rewrote the standards of acceptable political conduct, it is beyond so much as a bleat of comment.
"An unusually good liar," is how Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, a former Presidential contender, described Bill Clinton months ago in an interview. Not now. From the Senate campaign committees, Sen. Kerrey tries to ride the Clinton coattails with Mediscare ads for his candidates. The new standards are internalized.
We think of Whitewater committee stalwart Senator Paul Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat. Sen. Sarbanes defended it all, and most skillfully. Then in the end, he signed onto the new standards, allowing the public humiliation of witness Jean Lewis. Sen. Sarbanes knows more than most, and we would give a nickel for his private thoughts as he enters the voting booth Tuesday, or for that matter the thoughts of Bob Kerrey or Bill Bradley or Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
The painful imperative of ensuring Democratic viability for the future is, we repeat, understandable. The screaming silence is not. And the flaccid hand-wringing of editorial endorsements appearing now is marginally better than, but oddly reflective of, the flaccid tone set by this Presidency's first term.
Whatever the result next Tuesday, these same Democratic elites will be back in public the next day insistently making their always high-minded arguments for high-minded causes. But Bill Clinton is debauching them as well; after this performance, there will be little reason to take their professions any more seriously than his.
** Doesn't it make you want ot slam your fist on the desk and say "What is going on here!" Not to mention a few obscenities thereafter.
Marty |
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