His party's over:
Tuesday 25 August 1998
Issue 1187
Has the cookie crumbled for Bill
Clinton?
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Washington
External Links
'This . . . may
even require
his
resignation'
[essay by
Sam Nunn, 23
Aug '98] -
Washington
Post
Macbeth by
William
Shakespeare
Congress 'will not impeach for a single mistake'
IF in doubt, it is always wisest to assume that Bill Clinton will
confound his enemies. But this time there is very little doubt. The
whole of political Washington now knows that the game is almost
up.
The public at large - plump, prosperous,
disengaged and slow to anger - is a long way
behind the curve. President Clinton's job approval
ratings are still holding above 65 per cent, kept
aloft by the Dow Jones Index and the asset
bubble of the Roaring Nineties. But this is an
anomaly that cannot persist for long. On trust and
honesty his ratings have already fallen through the
floor. A Washington Post-ABC News poll had
him down to the Nixonian level of 19 per cent on
"character".
There has been a tectonic change in the political
landscape after his admission that he toyed with
the American people for seven months,
stonewalling with implausible claims of executive
and attorney-client privilege.
Returning after a year in Britain, I am
dumbfounded by the insurgent mood of the
Washington media. Indeed, it is downright
putschist. Former cheerleaders for the Clinton
White House are on the television every night
fulminating against the President, cursing him with
the fury of the betrayed.
The bureau chiefs for the great metropolitan
newspapers and political weeklies shake their heads wearily at
suggestions that Mr Clinton can somehow mount a defence against
perjury by quibbling over the nature of sex acts, whether performed
with or without cigars. As for the idea of a fresh Oval Office address
to the nation, a new improved apology to show that he is genuinely
sorry this time, they smile knowingly at the naivity of such an absurd
gambit. Mr Clinton's problems have moved beyond public relations.
US News & World Report, which slept through the first
five-and-a-half years of the Clinton presidency, is reporting this
week that Congress will soon receive a bombshell from the
independent counsel, Kenneth Starr. The Starr report will conclude
that the President "suborned perjury and obstructed justice". It will
"echo the language of the Watergate era - abuse of power and lack
of fitness for office".
Newsweek, owned by the Queen Bee of the Beltway Democratic
establishment, the Washington Post proprietor Katharine Graham,
says much the same. It reports that Mr Clinton's testimony before
the grand jury last week "further entangled him in a web of lies".
The magazine implies that the President's secretary, Betty Currie,
has exposed him to likely impeachment proceedings by revealing a
conspiracy to cover up the affair with Monica Lewinsky. For good
measure, it adds that the descriptions of Mr Clinton's sexual
proclivities in the Starr report will make people "want to throw up".
This looks like the end of the road. Reporters for the elite media are
being taken aside by those in the know - the FBI, the Starr
investigation, the arbiters of power at the Metropolitan Club - and
warned that President Clinton could be facing 10, 12 or more counts
of criminal conduct, and that is on the Lewinsky matter alone.
The few Democrats who dare to appear on television to defend the
White House are already hedging their bets. If the reports are true,
they admit, the President will almost certainly have to think of
alternative employment. Their words maintain that there is still doubt
about the facts, but their body language says otherwise.
Loyalty is weak. The Clinton administration, after all, once played a
cynical game of "triangulation" to distance itself from the Democrats'
Leftish rump in Congress. The Democratic leadership in the House,
in turn, regards him as an opportunist, a man without ideology who
sold out to the corporate lobbies and adopted the balanced-budget
agenda of the bond markets.
Increasingly it is a question of political survival for Democrats facing
close races in the mid-term elections this November. The party has
already lost both the House and the Senate under this president.
There is now a fear of a wipeout on the scale of the post-Watergate
rout of 1974, when Republicans on Capitol Hill paid the price for
Nixon's protracted disgrace.
In private the whispers are getting louder every day. If it were done,
they plot and scheme, if the knife were to be plunged before Bill
Clinton can do any more damage to the party, 'twere well it were
done quickly.
Mr Clinton surely knows he can expect little mercy. Sam Nunn, the
former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has
already delivered the first blow to the head. In an essay in the
Washington Post (see external link), he called on Mr Clinton to
remember his duty to the American people.
"This will require personal sacrifice and may even require his
resignation, but would fulfil the President's most important oath, to
preserve and protect our nation," he wrote. In other words: be gone
from here, you cad, before we have you tarred and feathered and
ridden out of town on a rail.
But has Mr Clinton got the message?
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