WASHINGTON IS MORE IN TOUCH WITH REALITY THAN THE REST OF THE COUNTRY
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.
JUNE 18, 1998
WASHINGTON -- When will the Boy President's ratings in the polls match his performance in office? This is one of those rare moments in modern American history when Washington is more in touch with reality than the rest of the country.
The president's stature steadily declines here among the political cognoscenti. His condition is perceived as either laughable or embarrassing, depending on one's original estimate of him.
Actually, a growing number of Democrats, fetched by candor, are now admitting behind closed doors that they never believed back in 1992 that candidate Clinton could survive the Gennifer Flowers scandal. Now it is the Monica Lewinsky scandal that threatens, and do you recall when it was chic to say that Bill Clinton did not really have a women problem or that his private life could not have public consequences?
Clinton pulled through the Flowers scandal by having more money than his opponents -- possibly Asian money. (The Associated Press reported on June 9 that money from Indonesia was donated in 1992 by Clinton's friend James Riady after Clinton's nomination. There is reason to believe it was available during the primaries). Will money -- foreign or domestic -- help him now? Can money whisk away the two scandals that now threaten his presidency, L' affaire Lewinsky and the Chop Suey connection?
Who by now doubts that our ithyphallic president took advantage of a terminally silly 21-year-old White House intern? That he has lied about it under oath is a grim fact that even his staff must realize. That he suborned perjury and obstruction of justice are two likelihoods that in all probability will soon be established as facts.
Then there is the Chop Suey connection. From such disparate sources as The New York Times and the Thompson committee hearings, the realization has grown in Washington that our happy-go-lucky president raised funds for his 1996 campaign against the hellish Bob Dole by recklessly disregarding past standards of decorum, established ethics and, in some instances, the law.
More damaging still to the public interest, the Boy President approved of technology transfers -- even more than he has admitted -- from companies run by his domestic campaign contributors to some of his foreign campaign contributors. Some of those technology transfers appear to have set off a nuclear arms race in South Asia.
The president's forthcoming trip to China is actually going to put him in the company of some of his most generous 1996 campaign contributors. No other president has ever been able to make this claim. In fact, no other president has ever raised funds in China. Do you suppose that when Richard Nixon made his opening to China he realized that he was establishing an eventual source of campaign support for the Democrats? The vicissitudes of history, as they say.
The White House's response to the president's detumescence is to pounce on any opponent who says anything the least bit controversial, even though the opponent might be speaking the unassailable truth.
Sometimes the exploited statement does not even have to be controversial. Thus Rahm Emanuel terms it a "bombshell" when Ken Starr admits to a so-called journalist that he has spoken off the record to real journalists to correct misinformation fed to them by the White House. So long as a prosecutor does not talk about grand-jury testimony, this is common practice established by legal precedent. There is no bombshell here.
Or consider the huge row the White House orchestrated against Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. In response to an interviewer's question as to whether homosexuality is a sin, Lott, a Southern Baptist, answered "Yeah." He went on to say: "You should still love that person. You should not try to mistreat them or treat them as outcasts."
Yet the White House saw its opportunity. White House press secretary Mike McCurry, moral watchdog for the nation, rushed out with the judgment that Lott was "backward" and that "the majority leader has taken an incorrect view."
Unfortunately, the White House is not in a very good position to venture into disputes over morality. Lott's rejoinder to McCurry was irrefutable: "Mr. McCurry's experience within the White House does not qualify him to tell the American people what is right and what is wrong. What he considers to be backward are the views and the values of the great majority of Americans, who understand and are concerned about the grave social and ethical questions our country faces."
In time that majority is going to apply its "views and values" to McCurry's boss. All they need to know is what Washington already knows.
*** R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor in chief of The American Spectator. To find out more about R. Emmett Tyrell Jr., and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 1998 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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