Clinton may yet survive
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
THE booming US economy came to a sudden halt in the second quarter of
this year. The Clinton presidency is now following suit in the third
quarter. If I had to make an idle prediction, I would say that these two
events may soon start to feed on each other in an accelerating downward
spiral. It will not end until the excesses of the era have been cleaned
out of the American system.
Possibly so, respond my friends in Arkansas, but don't bet on the demise
of Bill Clinton just yet. They know from long experience that this is a
man who carries a special gene for survival. Every kind of scandal
swirled around him at one time or another during his 12-year tenure as
state governor, whether it was money from a convicted cocaine dealer
funding his election campaigns, or rumours of a joint bank account with
a convicted fraudster (which later turned out to be true), or a record
of seductions that, touchingly, showed no bias on grounds of race,
class, age, weight or, for that matter, looks.
But charm always brought him through, and his cultural "cohort" in the
American press has been famously unwilling to strike one of their own.
In the 1992 presidential primaries, Gennifer Flowers appeared with tapes
indicating that Mr Clinton had suborned perjury and had engaged in the
criminal obstruction of a court proceeding.
"If everybody kinda hangs tough. If they don't have pictures, and if no
one says anything, then they don't have anything," he can be heard
saying to the blonde cabaret singer. The press responded by destroying
her, not him. Six years later, Gennifer Flowers was essentially
vindicated when the President admitted, in compelled testimony, that the
two had indeed had a sexual relationship.
But things are rather different in 1998. Charm and a friendly press are
no defence against a special prosecutor, appointed by the judicial
branch, with a statutory duty to pursue evidence of wrong-doing by the
President. There are different views about Kenneth Starr, of course. The
White House has succeeded in demonising him as the Inquisitor from Hell,
bent on overturning the verdict of a democratic election.
This is very useful. If he exonerates Mr Clinton, it will be said that
even Mr Starr could not dig up any dirt, with his army of investigators,
in a three-year witch-hunt that saw subpoenas delivered to half the
population of Arkansas. (Or so goes the folklore.) If he indicts, or
submits a report to Congress recommending impeachment, his motives can
be impugned. Judging by the polls, the majority of Americans believe
that he is "out to get" Mr Clinton by whatever means.
I can only laugh. In my own experience, Mr Starr is a trimming,
limp-wristed procrastinator with the zeal of a plump sheep, who works
part-time on the job, craves approval and bears the imprint of the last
person who sat on him. He panicked when his own lead prosecutor told him
there was evidence of an FBI cover-up of the 1993 death of the White
House aide Vincent Foster. Mr Starr was not going to quarrel with the
FBI. The case was shut down. His prosecutor resigned in disgust, and
later accused the Office of the Independent Counsel of unethical
behaviour.
But after years of ineffectual dithering, Kenneth Starr has at last got
the bit between his teeth. Something must have nettled him. Mutterings
about his incompetence within the legal fraternity, perhaps, or more
likely an arms-length White House smear campaign that saw a private
investigator hired to watch his social life. (It was alleged, falsely,
that he had a mistress in Little Rock.)
In recent days, Mr Starr has secured the grand jury testimony of 11
Secret Service agents who work in the presidential protection detail.
One of them reportedly served as a "facilitator", procuring "come
hither" women spotted by the President on his trips around the country.
It will be interesting to see if this agent can match the tally set by
my good friend L D Brown, former corporal in the Arkansas State Police,
who has testified under oath that he solicited more than 100 women for
Bill Clinton during a two-year stint at the Governor's Mansion in the
1980s.
This Secret Service testimony seems to have convinced Mr Starr that he
finally had enough evidence to move against the White House. He promptly
issued Bill Clinton with a summons to appear before the grand jury, the
first such subpoena ever served on a President. In quick succession,
Monica Lewinsky's lawyers announced that she had agreed to a deal with
the Office of the Independent Counsel, promising "full and truthful
testimony" in exchange for blanket immunity from prosecution. Her
mother, Marcia Lewis, who seems to have been an assiduous promoter of
her daughter's Oval Office trysts, also struck a deal. And if that was
not enough, Mr Starr won a separate victory when a federal appeals court
ruled that Bruce Lindsey, the President's closest confidant at the White
House, did not enjoy attorney-client privilege and would therefore have
to testify as well.
It has been a long wait, but it now looks as if the shoe really is going
to drop. According to press reports, Miss Lewinsky is prepared to
testify that Clinton "encouraged" her to lie about their "alleged"
affair under oath and to take evasive measures to cover their tracks,
such as disposing of tell-tale gifts that had been subpoenaed as
evidence. If true, she will be accusing him of suborning perjury,
obstruction of justice and perjury in a federal lawsuit. That lawsuit,
not that it matters much now, was the sexual harassment case of Paula
Jones. The suit has since been thrown out of court, but Ms Jones has
been granted something of a posthumous victory. The documents of her
case have become foundation stones in Kenneth Starr's effort to prove a
campaign of witness intimidation, witness tampering, serial perjury and
assorted skulduggery by the President and his men.
I hesitate to conclude that Bill Clinton is doomed, however. What if he
puts on one of his magnificent, lip-biting, teary acts of contrition in
the Oval Office, with the whole nation watching bewitched on television,
and ends with an admission of the Lewinsky affair and a plea for
forgiveness? He could throw everything in the stew: the early death of
his natural father; his abusive, alcoholic step-father; how they teased
him at school and called him "fat boy"; his late mother's death from
cancer; his feelings of deep remorse over the pain inflicted on his wife
and daughter; his regret that he had let down the women and men of
America who had put their trust in him, not once, but twice. It would be
utterly nauseating, yet it might very well work in the mushy,
sentimental, post-Christian morality of fin de siŠcle America.
He may skate yet, as they say in Arkansas.
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