The Telegraph - 09/14/98
KENNETH Starr has failed to catch his prey. It was significant that the Dow Jones index enjoyed a "relief rally" after the impeachment referral was delivered to Congress, rising 180 points on the early verdict that Mr Starr had not established "high crimes and misdemeanours" - whatever they are supposed to be.
The politics of Washington remain just as scrambled and confused as they were a week ago. Reading through the narrative and footnotes of this grotesque report, I am forced to conclude that Mr Starr has
lost his wits. What could have possessed the Office of the Independent Counsel to include grand jury testimony from Monica Lewinsky about the failing marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton?
"President Clinton once confided in Ms Lewinsky that he was uncertain whether he would remain married after he left the White House. He said in essence, 'who knows what will happen four years from now when I am out of office?' Ms Lewinsky thought that 'maybe she will be his wife'."
It is hard to see how this gratuitous paragraph, up front, on page five of the 445-page report, serves to advance the indictment for perjury, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice. It gives credence to the White House counter-attack that the report is nothing but "pornography" and a "hit-and-run smear campaign" intended to humiliate the President and the First Lady.
Mr Starr knew before he issued the report that he too is on trial, that he would be judged harshly if there was any suggestion of unfairness in his methods. Yet he and his team of prosecutors have allowed their personal animus against the White House to consume them. His anger was understandable, perhaps. A White House surrogate, James Carville, had declared "war" on Mr Starr, and private investigators were employed to dig for dirt on his staff in a blackmail strategy that amounted to obstruction of justice. But provocation is no excuse.
The elder statesmen of the Democratic Party are still holding their fire, wary of defending a president who gets his kicks receiving oral sex while he is on the telephone to members of Congress. But lesser
Democrats are starting to emerge from their bunkers, gingerly experimenting with the line that Mr Clinton's actions were just "low crimes and misdemeanours". Yes, he was a naughty boy, but doesn't
everybody lie about sex? Hillary has forgiven him, so why can't the rest of the country? This is just a private matter, and it has gone on too long already. So there, Mr Starr: get a life.
This is an extraordinary state of affairs. The Starr Report has produced evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the President has committed multiple felonies and used the power of his office to thwart the law. If Mr Clinton were an ordinary citizen, and if this case were taken to trial, there is a 100 per cent certainty that he would be convicted by a jury of his peers. He would go to prison.
De facto, if not de jure, the President of the United States is now a criminal and a felon - a convict manqu‚. Yet defenders are being drawn into arguments that trivialise his offences, and by omission
justify them. As a case of "defining deviancy down", to borrow the words of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, this surely takes the biscuit.
Yet the process has still not reached its final G”tterd„mmerung. With this president there is always another shoe to drop, and another, and another. Each revelation is little worse than the last, but never
quite enough to induce a sense of universal revulsion. The apologists keep on apologising, ratcheting down the standards of accepted ethical behaviour. They do so, usually, because they cannot bear the
thought that Newt Gingrich and the Republican Right could be beneficiaries of Mr Clinton's fall. But like the proverbial frog in slowly heated water, they do not realise what is happening to them until it is too late to jump.
Bill Clinton's enormous charm, his intellectual gifts, his success as the helmsman of the Roaring Nineties - or the asset bubble, in the judgment of his critics - has made him all the more dangerous to
the American polity. President Richard Nixon exuded an air of paranoia. From 1973 to 1974 he presided over a wrenching recession and a 50 per cent fall in the stock market. It was hard to love the man. There
was no cushion of forgiveness.
But Mr Clinton is a master manipulator of mass opinion. He has been able to seduce enough of the American people into acquiescence, and by extension complicity, in his serial violations of the cultural
code, not to mention the law. Everyone knows that adultery happens all too often, though not nearly as often as Mr Clinton's allies now claim, but at least there was a generally accepted convention that such behaviour was shameful and destructive.
Everybody tells white lies from time to time, but at least there was once a very sharp divide between fibbing and outright perjury in a court of law.
There are laws on the books designed to protect young women from predatory sexual advances by their employers. Overnight, Mr Clinton has made these regulations practically unenforceable. In their pathetic efforts to shield him, American feminists can be heard blathering on television that boys will be boys. We are witnessing the great leap backwards, beyond male chauvinism to medieval standards of droit de seigneur.
As long as Americans continue defending this man, he will take them further and further down the slippery slope. Honour is losing its currency. So is the code of personal responsibility. Ultimately,
Clinton will undo the rule of law and knock away the underpinnings of the world's greatest democracy. |
